Maine Lobster – POLI 3991 mapping exercise

Maine, 缅因美国

How is it produced?

Maine Lobster is produced in the Gulf of Maine, which is a dynamic and varied ecosystem with various marine and estuarine habitats, such as salt marshes, seagrass beds, tidal mud flats, underwater rocky outcrops, and kelp beds, which is inhabited by more than 3,000 marine species including Maine lobster. In shallow rocky water areas, lobsters will have more hiding places to avoid predators. That is why they choose to live in shallow water.

Maine lobsters are so named because they are mostly caught in the Maine region. Here the water temperature is higher than in Canadian water. (The colder the water, the harder a lobster’s shell can be.) The live seawater temperature of Maine lobsters is higher so they are softer than Canadian lobsters. And the meat of the Maine lobster is softer and has a more delicious taste. (Fishermen’s Net. 2021) Canadian lobsters live in cold waters, so their shells are thicker and stiffer than Maine lobsters. It is this that affects the sweetness and softness of the lobster meat, which results in a relatively inferior taste of lobster meat compared to Maine lobster.

As a result, Maine lobster is more welcomed than Canadian lobsters among consumers, so the need and price of Maine lobster is higher (price for Canadian lobsters is 50% to 70% of the price of Maine lobster.

Describe the supply chain to the store shelf in Canada:

Maine lobsters can survive up to 48 hours after getting out of the water. So they can be packed and delivered to Canada alive via air transportation. Actually, the price for Maine lobster sold in Canada is climbing since 2018, which saw a buying $43.72 million worth in July, more than double in that same month last year. The increased purchase power of Canadian is one of the reasons of growing, another important reason is that the tariff China imposed on Maine lobster made a plummet for the amount of Maine lobsters directly import to China, but increase the number of lobsters imported to Canada, which is a transfer station of Maine lobster sent to China (Levi 2022). It doesn’t make sense for Canada to resell U.S.-sourced lobster, because the country-of-origin labels on the shipment would note the product is from the United States, and that would trigger the tariffs if it were exported to China. What Canada do is processing live Maine lobster to frozen lobster and sold back to China or even the United States.

What is the power balance between the producer and seller?

Exports of live lobster from Maine to Canada rose to $43.72 million in July 2018 from $327,458 in June, according to figures from WISER Trade, an international trade data firm. That compares to $19.14 million in July 2017, up from $629,632 in June 2017(Levi 2022).

Can you recommend changes to the system to improve the balance?

In terms of lobster, Canada is the big winner of the U.S-China trade war, but the fisherman from Maine are in the harsh winter; Soon after tariffs were implemented, Maine’s exports to China nearly disappeared completely, and according to the latest data from the MITC exports have plunged nearly 84 percent since the tariffs were implemented.(Ross 2018) “The cost of the trade war —US tariffs on China and China’s retaliatory tariffs — were tremendous for the US economy and a lot of those costs continue to this day because most of those tariffs remain in place,” said Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. For the estimated 20,000 people who are directly employed by Maine’s lobster industry, any hurdle to bringing lobsters to market is a blow to an industry that is having an exceptionally tough year (Levi 2022). And there will be nothing change unless the world’s largest and second-largest sign a new trade agreement.

References/Resources:

Gulf of Maine Association. A sea within a Sea.