Rabobank: "Coronavirus—a seafood analyst’s perspective"

Just as all politics is local, all reporting is...?
Sorry, brain spasm.
From The Fish Site, March 10:

As the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread, The Fish Site caught up with Dr Beyhan de Jong, food and agribusiness specialist at Rabobank, to try and assess its impacts – in China and beyond.

“I was asked to give a presentation on this at last week’s North Atlantic Seafood Forum. The coronavirus is still very much a wildcard – we don’t know how much it will spread so it’s hard to read the markets right now – but we came up with four different scenarios, none of them good,” reflects Dr de Jong.

“And since I first prepared the presentation, we’ve already gone from the least bad option to somewhere between the third and second worst,” she adds.

As a result, looking at the macro-economic situation, Dr de Jong predicts that the impact of the virus looks likely to be closer to that of the 2008 global financial crisis of 2008-2009, rather than to SARS – due to the fact that the Chinese and global economies are much more closely linked since the outbrak of the latter, back in 2003.

“The Chinese economy and the global economy are so closely linked, with many countries heavily dependent on China for manufacturing their goods, as a market for their exports and as a source of tourists,” she explains. “If the forecast for the Chinese economy to grow 2 percent slower than anticipated in 2020 is correct, then global growth rates will drop by 1 percent.”

Looking at the food and agriculture sectors, Dr de Jong notes that the restaurant and food service businesses are being hit the hardest – a trend compounded by the timing of the outbreak in the run-up to Chinese New Year. And, although many provinces of China are beginning to lift movement restrictions, there’s no sign of an immediate recovery.

“The initial forecast was for the Chinese economy to start to rebound in Q2, but we now think that it’s not going to happen until Q3 or Q4. And, looking ahead, while industrial production is beginning to rebound, consumer spending is lagging behind,” explains the Rabobank analyst....

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