Italy's Manila clam harvest falls 93% as blue crabs take the lagoons
Manila clam harvests in the Scardovari lagoon have fallen 93 percent in three years, and the consortium that works the beds has lost more than 600 members. For buyers of vongole, this is no longer a bad season. It is a supply base that has been removed.
The cause is the Atlantic blue crab. Callinectes sapidus has been present in the Po Delta for decades, but its population exploded from 2023, when warmer Mediterranean water and drought-driven salt intrusion into the Po river created conditions the species had not previously enjoyed. The crabs crush shells with their claws and eat what is inside. Some clam beds in the delta now yield broken shell and nothing else, CNN reported after spending time with fishers in Scardovari.
The Numbers
Annual clam output in the Scardovari lagoon, one of Europe's largest clam harvesting sites, dropped from 4,800 tonnes to 340 tonnes, according to figures compiled from the local consortium and reported by The Cool Down.
Blue crab landings across the Po Delta moved in the opposite direction: roughly 200 tonnes in 2022 against 2,000 tonnes in 2024, a nine-fold increase that turned a pest into a commercial catch.
The workforce followed the clams. Consortium membership fell from 1,470 to 860, and more than 600 fishers, about 40 percent of the members, handed back their licences. Italy is the second-largest producer of Manila clams after China, and national output has historically reached 55,000 tonnes a year, with the Po Delta lagoons at the centre of the industry.
Italy's government has committed at least EUR 10 million to crab removal and to fences and netting around the beds that still hold stock. An earlier cull programme removed 2.3 million kilograms of crabs over two years and was then shelved. Researchers involved in the delta say eradication is not a realistic target.
What It Means for Buyers
Italy is the largest clam market in Europe and a reference price for the whole Mediterranean trade. When its own beds fail, Italian packers and wholesalers do not stop selling vongole. They import.
That shift is already visible in the frozen channel. Half-shell Manila clam (Ruditapes philippinarum) is the product that carries the vongole premium, and buyers who previously took Italian half-shell now have to look at Chinese and Southeast Asian supply for the same species, or accept short-necked clam and green willow clam meat as substitutes. The substitution is not like for like: meat yield, sand content and shell thickness differ, and recipe formats built around a 35-40 mm shell do not always survive the change.
Recovery timing is the part buyers most often get wrong. A clam bed that has been grazed out does not refill when the crabs are removed. Seed has to be relayed, and market-size product takes two to three years from there, assuming the beds are not hit again. Planning import coverage for 2027 on the assumption that Italian supply returns is a bet against that timeline.
The practical read: expect firmness in half-shell Manila clam through the first half of 2027, and expect Italian buyers to be more flexible on origin and on frozen meat than they were two years ago.
What to Watch
Winter crab behaviour. Blue crabs burrow into mud to survive cold water, so a mild winter keeps pressure on the remaining beds through spring.
How the EUR 10 million fencing programme is actually deployed, and whether it protects the highest-yield lagoons or only the easiest ones to enclose.
EU import volumes of frozen clam meat from Asia in the first quarter of 2027, which is where the Italian shortfall will show up first.
Whether any remaining Po Delta lagoon is closed outright, which would remove the last domestic half-shell volume from the market.
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This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI and is published for general information only. It does not constitute trading, pricing, or investment advice, and readers should verify all figures against the original sources linked above before making commercial decisions. Content on this page is partly AI-generated. Easy Seafood makes no warranty as to its accuracy or completeness.
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