Cost Structure and Profitability of Mussel Aquaculture in Greece

Mussel aquaculture is being conducted for more than 50 years in Greece. Lately, production seems to deteriorate both in terms of quality and quantity, thus negatively affecting economic output. On top, there also exist some evidence of environmental degradation at least at the wider production area at northern Greece. Nevertheless there is only few research available on the costs and the profitability of the sector. The structure of the sector, which consists mainly of micro and small enterprises does not allow for data collection based on published annual balance sheets. To date, the basic variables available under the EU Data Collection Framework, namely annual production and number of production sites, does not allow for any economic analysis of the sector. In this paper, we briefly present the evolution of mussel aquaculture production in Greece mainly based on existing literature, we discuss the challenges presently faced by the sector and we present preliminary results on the cost structure and the profitability of Greek mussel aquaculture companies based on data from an ongoing survey in northern Greece.