Following a surge by 80% in India’s green onion prices, Nepal and Bangladesh are facing a similar spike in this staple of Asian cooking. The culprit is inflation, which has battered India for the better part of 2023. Compounded by the sporadic monsoon rains of March, 2023 that destroyed local crops, inflation has made food costly.  Wholesale onion prices in India shot...

Dungeness crab business is losing out in Oregon after the fisheries authorities imposed restrictions on fishing to safeguard the endangered humpback whales from accidental entrapment. On August 4, 2023, the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission selected to indefinitely extend the fishing moratorium that was originally slated to end this summer. The Oregon Dungeness crab market was worth $91 million in...

The US lobster season is in full swing after Florida opened its fishing waters this summer.  There are more happenings including the growing love for rock lobsters (spiny lobsters), the rarity of the blue lobster and the discovery of a new way to harvest shellfish as soon as they molt in Taiwan.   The gulf stream fans interest for spiny lobsters...

Mexico and Peru are sharing the American love for fresh tropical avocados via back-to-back seasons. While Mexico is the de facto supplier of over 80% of all avocado imports into the U.S., Peru is the benefiting cheerleader. Since 2009, the country has been supplying the U.S. out of season. For an avocado season that peaks in May through August, the Peruvian avocado season...

The news overview this summer of US crabs hinges literary on a year-on-year continual drop in prices. Not just in the US, but in Canada too, where the regulators set a minimum wharf or wholesale price of $2.20 a pound and no less than $5.9 a pound for export prices back in May, 2023. The aim is to prevent further price declines...

The Florida lobster season started in early August after a two-day ‘appetizer.’ By midnight July 28, snorkelers, professional divers and sport fishing lovers were already turning their crawfish catches over fire grates. This was in the aftermath of the then just-concluded Florida lobster mini-season of July 26-28 each year. Florida Keys alone attracts around 40,000 folks in the two-day period fishing opening....

The American ginseng market has experienced phenomenal growth in 5 years. The annual wholesale market value of dried wild ginseng from the US stood at $27 million in 2015, while that of ginseng extracts stood at $1.3 billion in 2020. In this context, here are a few interesting happenings on this money mint of the United States. US reclassifies genuine ginseng from...

Taiwan’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recalled fresh American cherries by four U.S. suppliers after they failed the test for unauthorized pesticides. The move has made Taiwan enforce a temporary one-month suspension of imports of the American stone fruit.  Cherries were among 20 other food imports from the U.S. that did not go past lab examination. They contained slightly more than the limit...

At VND250,000 per kg or $10.53, US cherries landing in Vietnam plummeted by nearly 50% to a fresh low in week 2 of August 2023, considering they cost double that price (VND500,000) in summer 2022.  Customers are celebrating this boon in price by appearing in great numbers. A grocery operator in Ho Chi Minh City known as My Hanh says that the...

On Thursday, we featured a story on the climax of an avocado export deal to China that South Africa had chased for years. In follow up, our team has picked up the first lead on this uptick development, from the South Africa Avocado Growers Association (SAAGA). According to SAAGA’s CEO Mr. Derek Donkin, South Africa will have to wait a few weeks...