As Vadim Budaka, Director of Ocean Fish, noted in a conversation with LP correspondent, it became known in late summer that the European Commission proposed to the EU Council to make a decision on a sharp reduction in the total allowable catch for the 2025/25 season of certain marine fish species, including mackerel. Without waiting for the final decision on this issue, some large international traders reduced purchases and raised mackerel prices almost twice. In Moldova, until the last moment, fish sellers held back the prices for mackerel, selling off the remnants of previously imported products. The price increase of this fish last week was caused by import of new, expensive batches of goods.
At the end of last week, the retail price of mackerel in supermarket chains increased from about 140 lei/kg to more than 300 lei/kg on average. Moldovan fish sellers assume that the current round of price increase of mackerel and some other types of sea fish is not the last one, the next one will take place tentatively in February.
At the end of October this year, the EU Council reached a political agreement on new restrictions on catching most species of commercial fish. The exact size of quotas for European countries will be announced later.
The decision of the EU authorities is based on the recommendations of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) to reduce the allowable catch, in particular, mackerel by 70% (up to 174 thousand tons) due to the critical state of its resources.
