Never in the history of tuna has the buying power of the European consumer been so strong. While prices of tuna raw material, which are quoted in US dollars, are souring all over the world and have almost doubled over the last year, European consumers cannot get enough of tuna.

While the US canned tuna market is showing a year on year decline in canned tuna consumption, European markets keep showing growth. In Spain, where consumers have the worlds’ highest consumption per capita, the appetite for tuna keeps growing every year with double digit figures! Although whole round yellowfin prices have now reached as high as USD 2600 per M/T, Italians are hardly buying less.

The superiority of the Euro currency in the last 3 years is having a major impact on who rules the world tuna market, who gets the raw material and where and how tuna in produced, and who/which market gets to eat it.

With the EURO reaching a worth of USD 1,43 (during October this year), the Europeans have seen their global buying power rise by a staggering 65% since October 2000, when the Euro was only worth USD 0,85.  US president George Bush has to receive most of the credit for making the dollar so attractive for consumers. His lack of attention for the ever growing US deficit has been giving European tuna consumers the assurance that they could continue to keep getting access to healthy tuna at the best prices. This at a time when their own traditional Euro fish species were becoming far too expensive, as a result of depletion of the resources.

The dollar is still the dominating currency in the global tuna business scene, raw tuna is quoted and traded in dollars from Ecuador to Thailand to Papua New Guinea. But the question here is: for how much longer? How much more does the US dollar need to drop before major exporters of processed tuna all over the world start saying: “Give me Euros” !

In the last 7 years not only European consumers have benefited from this currency situation– but also the European tuna processing  industry. While they have been facing fiercely-increasing labor costs for their European workforce, compared to the low labor cost in dollar-countries like Ecuador and Thailand, at the same time they also witnessed the fall of imported pre-cooked tuna loins in Euros.

Mr. Bush has also been generous to them, as the graph shows. Although prices of raw material were quite firm throughout 2006, the European tuna industry paid -on average- less for its pre-cleaned and pre-cooked loins than in 2002. This explains why now almost the entire French and Italian canning industry have switched to the use of loins, and why now even Spanish tuna canners want lower duties on dollar loins coming from arch-rival Thailand. Spanish tuna cleaners are just not losing their jobs because of the low paid Asian workers, but mainly because of the low dollar. Spanish imports of loins in 2006 reached a record level. This trend has continued in 2007.

The power of the Euro is probably today the most visible in Ecuador. A few years ago Ecuador  changed its national currency ( the Sucre) for the dollar to become the national currency, making the country an el dorado for Euro tuna investors  If we observe Ecuador’s exports trend – there is a very strong decline in exports to the home of the dollar: the USA. At the same time, there has been a continued strong growth in shipments of canned tuna and loins to Europe. Many of the Ecuadorian canneries now have either Spanish owners or Spanish financial partners. Many of the country’s purse seiners are pre-financed by money from Euro countries. Even one of the world’s largest tuna traders has changed its focus from the USA to Europe, because that’s where the strongest buyers are today.

As long as Mr. Bush is President of the United States,  the European consumers and tuna processors can probably feel quite confident that they will continue to get their tuna, and at a very affordable Euro price, even if raw tuna prices might even go up higher.