The country’s fisheries output in the second quarter grew slightly to 1.139 million metric tons, from 1.134 MMT recorded last year, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) said in a report.
“Across the three subsectors, production from commercial fisheries and aquaculture showed decreases of 2.4 and 0.3 percent, respectively,” read the PSA report, which was published recently. “Municipal fisheries production exhibited an increase of 4.3 percent.”
The PSA said commercial fisheries output reached 280,810 metric tons, lower than the 287,680 MT recorded in the April-to-June period last year.
Data from the PSA indicated that commercial fisheries production accounted for 24.6 percent of total fisheries output.
Municipal fisheries output fell by 4.3 percent to 309,860 MT, from 297,050 MT last year, the PSA said. The subsector contributed 27.2 percent to total fisheries production.
“Of its total production, 87.2 percent came from marine municipal fisheries while the rest were from inland fisheries,” the report read.
Marine fisheries output reached 270,174.66 MT, 5.18 percent higher than the 256,858 MT recorded in the second quarter of last year, PSA data showed.
The remaining volume of municipal fisheries output were from inland fisheries, which reached 39,687 MT, 1.26 percent lower than last year’s record of 40,194 MT.
“During the second quarter of 2019, total aquaculture production was estimated at 548,390 metric tons. It was 0.3 percent lower than the output during the same period of previous year of 550,010 metric tons,” the report read.
“The subsector contributed the biggest share of 48.1 percent to the total fisheries production in the second quarter of 2019,” it added.
At current prices, the value of fisheries production at P74.7 billion was 9.42 percent more in the second quarter of 2019, the PSA said in a recent report on the performance of the agriculture sector.
“Yellowfin tuna made a turnaround with its 57.73 percent growth in the value of output due to expansion in production and increase in prices. These reasons, likewise, caused the uptrends in the values of production of tiger prawn by 9.53 percent and tilapia by 3.01 percent,” the report read.
“Output expansion pushed up the value of round scad production by 3.84 percent. Because of price hikes, higher values of outputs were noted for seaweed by 16.70 percent and skipjack by 14.62 percent. Meanwhile, production shortfalls and price drop resulted in the reduction in the value of milkfish production by 3.42 percent,” it added.
In the first six months of the year, the PSA said fisheries output was up by 1.51 percent.
Image credits: Mau Victa