Saving Seafood

MAINE: State officials get an earful about proposed Belfast fish farm

February 13, 2020 — Dozens implored the Maine Board of Environmental Protection this week to put the brakes on plans for a $500 million land-based salmon farm here.

At a hearing Tuesday night, many who came to the University of Maine’s Hutchinson Center wore red to signify their opposition to Nordic Aquafarms’ project. It was the only chance for the public to address the BEP officials during their three-to-four-day visit to the midcoast city, where they will review environmental permit applications required for the project.

“I beg you to deny Nordic this opportunity to destroy our environment, our home, to line their pockets with gold,” Aimee Moffit of Belfast told state environmental officials.

The Norwegian-owned company is angling to build a flagship facility near the Little River in Belfast, with a goal of producing 33,000 metric tons of Atlantic salmon every year. It would construct 10 buildings — including several grow-out modules that company officials have described as “the largest aquaculture tanks in the world” — on a 54-acre site that’s currently mostly woods and fields.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

2025 global salmon growth forecasts overestimated, new paper argues

December 17, 2019 — Global salmon growth forecasts to 2025 could be overestimated by 6 to 8 percent, according to a new briefing paper from financial think tank Planet Tracker. The culprit is global warming, the paper argues.

In “Salmon Feels the Heat,” researchers analysed reported fish losses attributed to recurring environmental shocks over the past nine years, as reported by the 10 largest publicly listed salmon producers in Norway, Chile, and the United Kingdom. They found that the aggregated production and earnings losses relative to forecast production reached 5 percent for the period between 2010 to 2019.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

More Norwegian salmon producers receive subpoenas in US DOJ antitrust investigation

November 15, 2019 — Lerøy Seafood, Grieg Seafood, and SalMar each received subpoenas from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on Friday, 15 November, according to press releases from the three Norwegian salmon farming firms.

The subpoenas are part of a criminal investigation by the DOJ’s Antitrust Division into allegations of price-fixing in Norway’s farmed-raised salmon industry, according to the releases.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

US launches investigation into Mowi price-fixing allegations

November 14, 2019 — Salmon farming giant Mowi has announced it is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice regarding allegations of price-fixing in Norway’s farmed Atlantic salmon market.

The move by the U.S. DOJ stems from an ongoing investigation by the European Commission into “concerns that the inspected companies may have violated E.U. antitrust rules that prohibit cartels and restrictive business practices.” That investigation became public in February, when the E.C. carried out unannounced inspections at the premises of several Norwegian firms involved in the farmed Atlantic salmon sector in Europe.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Lerøy testing project to detect salmon health with implanted sensors

November 7, 2019 — Farmed salmon company Lerøy Seafood Group has launched a pilot project in Norway that would attach sensors directly to the bodies of salmon in cages, then use an underwater wireless network to capture data in real time from the sensors about fish behavior and transmit it to farm managers on the water’s surface.

The technology would be a major advance from current monitoring systems, which can’t directly measure fish health in the water, and would give salmon farmers the kind of detailed information about the fish in their cages that so far has eluded them.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Commitments worth $63 billion pledged for ocean protection

October 29, 2019 — Governments, businesses, organizations and research institutions made commitments toward improving marine health and productivity worth more than $63 billion at the Our Ocean 2019 conference in Oslo on Oct. 23 and 24.

A total of 370 commitments were made at the conference, which was initiated by former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry in 2014 and has run annually ever since. Our Oceans brings together international leaders to share knowledge and experiences, and to commit to action for healthier oceans. This year, 500 people from more than 100 countries attended, as well as 100 youth delegates.

“These commitments are not just empty promises,” said Norway’s minister of foreign affairs, Ine Marie Eriksen Søreide, in her opening address. The conference emphasizes public accountability, and recent research by Oregon State University shows that past Our Oceans commitments have resulted, among other things, in more than one-third of the ocean area now under protected status.

Read the full story at Mongabay

New Study Shows Arctic Cod Development, Growth, Survival Impacted by Oil Exposure

September 18, 2019 — The following was released by NOAA Fisheries:

Today, a team of U.S. and Norwegian scientists published new laboratory research findings that show how an Arctic fish species can be seriously affected by small amounts of crude oil released into surface waters. For Arctic (Polar) cod in its early stages of development, crude oil can be lethal if exposure is high enough. Some exposed Arctic cod eggs die not long after hatching due to toxicity. At lower exposure levels, others experience developmental issues affecting their survival when they become larvae and juveniles.

“With the warming ocean and sea ice decline in the Arctic, ship traffic is on the rise. As a result, cod and their habitats are at increasing risk to oil spills,” said Ben Laurel, research fisheries biologist, Alaska Fisheries Science Center and lead author of a new paper published this week in iScience.“Since Arctic cod are one of the most abundant circumpolar forage fish, they play a key role in the marine ecosystem. We really need to better understand how an oil spill will affect keystone species and the ecosystem as a whole.”

For this study, NOAA teamed up with Oregon State University, SINTEF Ocean, and Norway’s Institute of Marine Research. The multi-disciplinary team had expertise in toxicology, fish biology, energetic studies, embryology and chemistry. They conducted one of the first laboratory studies of oil impacts on this coldwater fish species.

Read the full release here

US plaintiffs claim Russian ban on Norwegian salmon prompted price collusion

August 21, 2019 — Norwegian salmon farmers cannot claim strong demand has brought spot prices up in recent years, given the size of the hole in the market left by Russia’s import ban, according to new claims from US plaintiffs filing a price-fixing suit.

A total of six US distributors are listed on the latest filing, made on Aug. 19, claiming that Norway’s farmers have colluded to charge higher prices for salmon.

Plaintiffs Euclid Fish Company, Euro USA, Schneider’s Fish and Sea Food Corporation, Beacon Fisheries, Cape Florida Seafood, The Fishing Line, and Hesh’s Seafood — “individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated” — have suit several salmon farmers alleging they were damaged by “price collusion”.

The full list of defendants in the US lawsuit are: Norway’s Mowi — and its North American subsidiaries Marine Harvest USA, Marine Harvest Canada and Ducktrap River of Maine; Norway-based Grieg and its British Columbia, Canada, arm, Grieg Seafood BC; Norway’s Bremnes Seashore as well as Ocean Quality, Ocean Quality North America, Ocean Quality USA and Ocean Quality Premium Brands, entities that are a partnership between Bremnes and Grieg; SalMar; Leroy and Leroy Seafood USA; and Scottish Sea Farms, a venture jointly owned by SalMar and Leroy.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

NY spending $2M to study offshore wind impact on waterways, fishing

August 9th, 2019 — New York State said Thursday it will spend more than $2 million for five studies to examine ways to reduce offshore wind farms’ impact on marine environments and commercial fishing.

The studies, awarded by the state Energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA, followed Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s announcement of the first two large offshore wind projects for the state power grid.

The projects will produce 1,700 megawatts of a potential 9,000 megawatts planned by the state by 2040. Hundreds of turbines upward of 800 feet high will spin in waterways off Long Island, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts.

Another project by Norway-based Equinor for 816 megawatts will be located as close as 15 miles offshore from Long Beach.

Read the full story at Newsday

Farmed salmon spot prices drop further, but tight supply predicted

June 25, 2019 — Spot prices for Norwegian farmed salmon continue to come down, according to the latest update from SpareBank 1 Markets’ Tore Tonseth, though he is more bullish on the longer-term outlook.

For this week coming — week 26 of 2019 — should see average prices come down to NOK 54-57 per kilogram, from NOK 59-62/kg, he wrote.

“Spot prices going into a new week seem to have fallen further, and we are currently talking about prices in the NOK mid-50s. The large volatility in price seen over the past few weeks has probably created some uncertainty in the market, and combined with higher volumes, the spot price has been pushed further down.”

Predicting salmon prices from one week to the next is difficult at the moment, he said, but biomass numbers in Norway show very little harvest growth potential in the coming few months.

“Our base case continues to be spot prices in the low-mid NOK 60s in the next two or three months, which means that we expect prices to recover relatively soon.”

Read the full story at Undercurrent News