Pakistan Seafood Exports Hit Record $568 Million, Target $3 Billion

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's fisheries sector just booked its biggest year in history. The Ministry of Maritime Affairs claims $568 million in fish and fish-product exports for FY2025-26. That works out to roughly 16% growth over last year's $489 million, officially the highest number the sector has ever posted. Minister Muhammad Junaid Anwar Chaudhry names three drivers: stricter food-safety compliance, upgraded cold-chain infrastructure, and European buyers trusting Pakistani supply chains again after years of doubt.

Pakistan Seafood Exports Face an $86 Million Data Gap

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics tells a different story entirely. Final PBS trade data puts FY2025-26 seafood earnings at $482 million, not $568 million. That's an $86 million hole in the ministry's number. Growth on paper drops from 16% to a much thinner 3.6%. Worse, PBS volumes actually shrank about 1% year-on-year hardly the picture of a booming export sector. June alone tells its own story: exports fell to $36.7 million from $51.9 million in May. Exporters and former officials are now asking the obvious question did the ministry publish a preliminary projection and call it a final result?

Europe Opens Its Doors Again

Set the arithmetic dispute aside for a moment. Underneath it sits a genuine turnaround. Brussels shut Pakistani seafood out entirely in 2007 over hygiene failures and weak traceability a single regulatory decision that cost Pakistani processors access to one of the world's richest markets for six straight years. Four companies won partial re-entry in 2013. Full recovery took another thirteen years of compliance work; Pakistani seafood is only now back on European shelves in any real volume, at a trust level the industry hasn't seen in nearly two decades.

Also Read: Pakistan Food Exports Crash by $2.1 Billion Despite Strong Rice, Meat Sales

The product breakdown tells its own story too. Frozen fish led everything at $105.09 million. Squid and cuttlefish came close behind, $103.71 million. Fish meal brought in $83.12 million; shrimp, $62.14 million; crabs trailed at $36.89 million, sardines at $30.62 million, mackerel rounding things out at $22.67 million. Ten markets absorbed the bulk of it, China down to the US, with Thailand, Malaysia, the UAE, Japan, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Indonesia filling out the list. Separately, sixteen Pakistani plants cleared approval to sell into Russia for the first time, a small opening that could eventually stretch across the wider Eurasian Economic Union.

None of that is the real prize, according to the Marine Fisheries Department. Pakistan still ships mostly raw and semi-processed catch. Turn that into finished, value-added product instead, department officials argue, and export earnings could climb toward $3 billion, nearly six times this year's disputed figure. "Pakistan's marine produce carries flavours the world hasn't fully discovered yet," one department statement put it, pushing exporters to invest in processing rather than shipping out raw fish and calling it a day.

Two government arms, one fishing season, two very different numbers. Whether Islamabad closes that value-addition gap will matter a lot more, in the end, than which spreadsheet wins this argument.