COVID’s crayfish casualties
IN EARLY NOVEMBER last year, Australian fishers watched in horror as tonnes of live western rock lobsters, worth an estimated $2 million, sat on an airport tarmac in China.
Chinese authorities wanted, they said, to arrange testing of the shellfish for the presence of heavy metals. The delay meant that, although the lobsters had been carefully packaged to arrive live, many perished, making them inedible.
Fishers here suspected the precious cargo had become another casualty in the recent China–Australia trade spat, in part sparked by tensions rising from questions and accusations about the origins of the COVID pandemic. Some of the stranded lobster consignment survived to eventually make it to Chinese consumers, but a total import ban by China on Australian lobsters followed. And COVID went on to ultimately have an even wider impact on the industry based on the much-prized shellfish, which are often known in Western Australia as crayfish.
LOBSTERS ARE BIG business, and nowhere is it bigger than in WA. The western rock lobster is Australia’s most valuable single-species fishery, worth $300–500 million per year before COVID. Western rock lobsters are fished along the south-western so the ongoing coastline, from Denham in the north to Augusta in the south. Sales to China normally account for about 94 per cent of WA’s catch, trade hiatus is seriously hurting producers.
WA’s lobster fishers are represented by the Western Rock Lobster peak body (WRL). Its CEO, Matt Taylor, explains to me some of the issues associated with the Chinese trade halt. “In WA we export more lobster than the rest of Australia and New Zealand combined,” he says. “When the Chinese market shut, our biggest problem became the scale of exports that we had
