Covid-19 impact on seafood industry

We’ve reviewed a range of data and information to analyse Covid-19 impact on seafood businesses throughout 2020. This involved a high-level view of the whole of the seafood supply chain to explore the impact on:

• UK seafood markets,
• Seafood business operations, and
• Consumer behaviour.

In the UK, we export a lot of the seafood we catch and import much of the seafood we eat. Since our seafood supply chain is heavily integrated into the global supply chain global responses to the Covid-19 pandemic affect our industry. As such information on this has also been included.

To put together these reviews we’ve drawn on data available at the time of writing. This included official statistics, industry insights and published news articles. Reference lists are included in the pdf version of the reports below.

Our initial report on this looks at impact from January to June and the new edition covers July to September.

Review of Covid-19 impact from July to September

Published in December 2020, the webpages linked below describe the impacts of Covid-19 from mid-summer to early autumn.

This covers the period where lockdown restrictions eased in July and August, and the subsequent rise in cases and increase in restrictions in August and September. This report also includes initial data collected during our regular processing survey – more details on this will be published on our Seafood processing data and insight webpage in 2021.

You can also download a copy of the full report from the link below:

Review of Covid-19 impact from January to June

Published in September 2020, the webpages linked below describe how seafood sectors have been affected in the first half of the year.

This covers the initial impacts of Covid-19 in January and February, the introduction of the UK lockdown in March and how this affected the industry from April until June.

You can also download a copy of the full report from the link below:

Updates to this review

We will provide a rolling update of Covid-19 impacts on the seafood industry.

We expect to release the next report, covering October to December 2020, in March 2021. It will feature data collected through our 2020 survey of the UK fishing fleet.

We'd appreciate any feedback or comments on this report - please contact Ana Witteveen by the details below.

Contacts