China’s craving for crayfish creates US$2 billion business
Previously a rice farmer’s worst enemy, five million people are now employed producing, cooking and serving hundreds of thousands of tonnes of the crawly burrowers each year
China’s prodigious appetite for crayfish has created a multibillion dollar business in China, large enough to provide a living for five million people.
Originally imported by Japanese traders to China’s Nanjing as feed for bullfrogs in the 1920s, but tracing their roots back to the southern states of the US such as Louisiana, crayfish used to be an insurmountable foe to local rice farmers after their terraced fields were razed by the crawly burrowers making it impossible to grow crops.
The crustacean invaders are now wreaking the same kind of havoc across ecosystems in Africa, but in China they went from “most hated” to “most sought-after” during the 1990s, not long after the country started simmering them with abundant spices and turning them into a culinary delicacy.
That is twice the weight of the gigantic pool built to hold the swimming competition of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and a 32 per cent jump from a year earlier, according to the latest study by China’s Ministry of Agriculture, making the country the world’s biggest producer and exporter.
“The group of young crayfish adherents in China is still growing, and they are bound to fuel an explosive growth of the current 14.66 billion yuan (US$2.15 billion) industry in years to come,” said the ministry’s report.
