Every Sunday for the past seven months, about 60,000 live North American lobsters packed in wet newspapers and Styrofoam coolers make the 18-hour flight to Asia in a Korean Air Lines Co. cargo plane.
The 12,000-kilometer trip from Halifax to Shanghai via South Korea has become a weekly routine this year with a surge in demand from China, where lobsters caught in North Atlantic waters are at least one-third the cost of competing supplies. As a result, exports have skyrocketed from Canada and the U.S., the world’s top producers, and American prices are the highest ever.
With no lobster industry of its own, China had relied mostly on Australian imports to satisfy growing demand as its middle class expanded. When the catch began shrinking off Western Australia, and a 2012 glut in Atlantic Canada and the Gulf of Maine sent prices plunging in North America that year, it became more attractive for the world’s most-populous nation to buy from halfway around the world.
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