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Aquaculture-related regime shifts

Brief description

Aquaculture growth has led to worries about overfishing and reduction in wild-caught food fish supply because of increased demand for fish meal. As such, the price ratio between fish meal and soybean meal has received much attention as an indicator of changing market conditions. In recent years, the price ratio between these two commodities has become more volatile. Several authors have suggested that the traditional relationship between fish meal and soybean meal has broken down and that this is evidence of increased demand pressure on fish meal. In this article, we investigate the hypothesis that there are two regimes for the relative price between fish meal and soybean meal. The empirical results support this hypothesis, with the low-price regime representing the traditional stable relative price. The continued linkages between the fish meal and the soybean meal markets indicate that aquaculture is reducing its dependency on marine proteins in favour of vegetable proteins.

Key References

  1. Asche, F., Oglend, A. and Tveteras, S. (2012), Regime Shifts in the Fish Meal/Soybean Meal Price Ratio. Journal of Agricultural Economics. doi: 10.1111/j.1477-9552.2012.00357.x
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