High crude oil prices reflecting the turmoil in the Middle East have hit the Japanese fishing industry hard, including through surges in costs for fuel and related equipment.<\/p>\n
“We used to spend about \u00a5130 million on fuel per ship a year, but fuel prices have now jumped two to three times in South Africa, where our boats are refueled,” said the owner of a company based in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, that has six longline tuna fishing boats for operations far out at sea.<\/p>\n
Revenue from tuna caught is almost offset by fuel costs, the company owner added.<\/p>\n
“Our bonito boats sail for days to find fishing grounds, but many of them now return early as fuel is expensive,” said a fishing industry official in Katsuura, Chiba Prefecture.<\/p>\n
In the city of Kagoshima, bonito fishing boats are sometimes unable to sail out due to a lack of bait. An official explained that high fuel prices are keeping purse seine fishing boats that catch Japanese anchovy, often used as bait for bonito, moored to shore.<\/p>\n
A fisher in the city of Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, who catches mackerel, horse mackerel, Japanese Spanish mackerel and other fish using fixed nets has also been impacted.<\/p>\n
Prices of styrofoam containers used to ship fish hauls continue to rise, and it is becoming difficult to secure crude oil-based ship paints, the fisher said.<\/p>\n
Distribution networks for fish are more complicated than those for other foods, making it difficult for fishing operators to pass on higher costs caused by rising fuel prices to consumers.<\/p>\n
Industry organizations in the country have asked the government for emergency aid to help fishery operators weather the storm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"High crude oil prices reflecting the turmoil in the Middle East have hit the Japanese fishing industry hard,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7917,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6939,14,8,449,33,35],"class_list":["post-7916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-fishing","tag-iran","tag-japan","tag-middle-east","tag-nihon","tag-oil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}