Maine's Lobster Export to China Faces Headwind of Trade War

choi

My post of yesterday titled forgot to provide the Chinese name of one of the two buildings JC Cube 賽馬會立方 -- the other new building is 大館當代藝術館" Tai Kwun Contemporary

These two buildings are No 20 and No 21, respectively, in
Map & Directory. Tai Kwun, undated.
https://www.taikwun.hk/en/visit/map_directory

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Shawn Donnan, As the Trade War Heats up, Lobsters Get Cooked. Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Nov 12, 2018.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/f ... e-trump-s-trade-war

Quote:

"Maine, the country's top [lobster] producer and exporter. The state's lobstermen had found a lucrative market in China, where consumer demand has grown exponentially in recent years. In 2017, US exports of live lobsters to China were worth $128.5 million, up from a third of that in 2015.

"One problem for American lobstermen is their Canadian rivals. Thanks to a trade agreement Prime Minister Justin Trudeau struck with the EU, Canadian crustaceans now land in Europe duty-free. US lobsters, meanwhile, face an 8 percent tariff with no sign of imminent relief. (While Trump is discussing a limited EU deal on industrial goods, European officials have resisted including agricultural trade, which bodes badly for lobsters.)  As a result, dealers in Maine have begun investigating whether to open bonded warehouses so they can sell Canadian [pay attention: NOT American] lobsters to clients in Europe and China, bypassing tariffs.

"Across the border, Canadians have started to complain about transshipping. (If the term sounds familiar, that's because it was at the root of the steel tariffs Trump imposed on Canada earlier this year when he claimed the country had become complicit in China's trade cheating.) 'Lobster from Maine is coming into Canada and being exported to China,' says Geoff Irvine, executive director of the Lobster Council of Canada. * * * In recent years, Chinese seafood companies have taken stakes in some Canadian wholesalers and begun running weekly charter flights carrying live lobsters from Halifax, NS [Nova Scotia], to Chinese cities. * * * Irvine says[:] 'They're buying plants  and buying capacity to ship.'

"Most everyone agrees the surge in the lobster catch has been the result of an increase in the population rather than overfishing. * * * The overfishing of Atlantic cod, a major predator of juvenile lobsters, and warming oceans that have supercharged some breeding grounds.  The latter influence, scientists say, appears to have played a major role. * * * The ramifications depend on your vantage point. The waters off Rhode Island and Long Island, which once had thriving lobster fisheries, have become too warm, effectively killing off the industries there. Farther north, the water temperature has hit a sweet spot at about 54F [12.2°C] that's turned an ideal cobble-bottomed seafloor in Maine’s northernmost waters into the lobster equivalent of an industrial-scale lobster-breeding factory.

"Lobsters take seven or eight years to grow to the 1.25-pound size that’s the workhorse of the industry

My comment:
(a)
(i) summary underneath the title in print: Trump's tariffs have inflicted economic pain in Maine
(ii) Print and the online version are the same.

(b) View graphics, but there is no need to read the rest.
(c) In quotation 2: bonded warehouse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonded_warehouse
(d) graphic 2 (heading: Value of US Lobster Exports, 2018) shows 2018, like all other previous years, Canada imports the most of Maine lobster export. That is because Canadians import to process in their factories and then resell to, say, Europe.