Thousands of people working in the shrimp farming industry on Honduras’ Pacific coast are now worried about their future after the Honduras government decided to sever diplomatic relations with Taiwan last month. .
“We don’t want them to stop doing business with Taiwan,” Lorena de Jesus Zelaya, 51, who works in a shrimp processing factory, told AFP.
She works with 800 other women at a warehouse in Choluteca province, where frozen shrimp are packed and sent to refrigerated containers for shipment to Taiwan, Mexico and Europe. Cholutka Province is located about 85 kilometers south of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Hongguo.
Wearing a hat, apron and rubber shoes, Celaya told AFP she had worked in the shrimp industry for 31 years.
Hongguo’s left-wing president, Xiomara Castro, announced last month that he would cut off diplomatic relations with Taiwan and establish diplomatic ties with China instead.
Workers in the shrimp industry in Hongguo worry that the severance of diplomatic ties between Hongguo and Taiwan will jeopardize the free trade agreement between Honduras and Taiwan signed in 2008, on which their livelihoods are largely dependent.
“For Honduras, as a shrimp producer, losing the Taiwan market is a very difficult situation, in terms of price,” businessman Yader Rodriguez, 46, told AFP.
Rodriguez said, “Taiwan is a high-value market, and our shrimp can be sold for almost twice the price in the Chinese market.”
He added that although China’s economy is 12 times the size of Taiwan’s, “we are very concerned about what this political decision will bring.”
According to Rodriguez, shrimp exports from Honduras are worth about $100 million a year.
The National Association of Aquaculturists of Honduras (ANDAH) has expressed concerns in several previous meetings with the authorities.
They fear Taiwan will refuse to buy shrimp from the Central American country and have demanded that the government send a letter to Taiwan demanding that trade ties continue despite a breakdown in diplomatic relations between the two countries.
“The government is willing to listen and find solutions,” said Juan Carlos Javier, the association’s president, adding that Taiwan earned more than a third of Honduras’ shrimp export revenue last year.
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