January 6, 2021 — Despite the ongoing challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Norwegian seafood exporters managed to have a near-record year of sales.
Norway exported 2.7 million metric tons (MT) of seafood products worth NOK 105.7 billion (USD 12.6 billion, EUR 10.2 billion) last year, the second-highest trade value ever achieved by the Scandinavian country, falling just 1 percent short of 2019’s record.
December 29, 2020 — The North Atlantic Seafood Forum has been postponed to June 2021.
The event had originally been scheduled to take place in Bergen, Norway, between 9 and 11 March, 2021. The new dates of the event will be 8 to 10 June, and the conference has been moved to a digital format, due to complications caused by Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic.
December 28, 2020 — The Norwegian Seafood Council (NSC) and non-profit EAT have entered into a partnership to promote the increased consumption of sustainable seafood ahead of a United Nations summit on future food systems.
Oslo, Norway-based EAT describes itself as a science-based global platform for food system transformation. It was created through funding from the Stordalen Foundation, the Stockholm Resilience Center, and the Wellcome Trust.
November 16, 2020 — Nearly two dozen Norwegian companies have received salmon farming licenses to pursue pilots of their innovative aquaculture concepts, but when these futuristic concepts will hit the water at a large scale remains murky in some cases.
A total of 20 companies received 102 development permits between 2016–2020, and while many have not even begun construction of the projects, the Norwegian government says the green light to pursue the farming systems won’t be turned off.
The development permits (see sidebar) were granted in some cases for a period of up to 15 years, giving companies plenty of runway to raise financing and refine the technology — a critical element to the successful implementation of the projects, according to Anne Osland, section manager for the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries.
“Many of these projects are very complex, and that it may take some time to get into operation,” Osland told IntraFish.
September 15, 2020 — In trawl fisheries, vessels usually spend costly amounts of time and fuel searching for fish. Even with advanced technology, the cost of finding fish comes with the price of investment. To increase efficiency, Kongsberg Maritime of Norway has developed an unmanned surface vehicle that can hunt for fish at a fraction of the cost of a fully manned fishing vessel.
“The vessel is equipped with high-definition SX95 omnidirectional sonar,” says Richard Mills, head of marine robotics sales at Kongsberg. “Then there is a moon pool in which we can put other equipment. We just put an EK80 echosounder in one for a company we can’t name, and we are hoping to demonstrate it next year for NOAA.” According to Mills, the USV can search large expanses of ocean and transmit data to land-based receivers and fishing vessels. “We sit down with our customers and look at cost benefits,” says Mills, noting that the USV could operate for as little as 15 percent of a manned vessel’s crew costs and fuel costs.
The 26.5-foot USV has a 7.3-foot beam and draws 2.3 feet. For receiving commands and transmitting data, the vessel has a mast that reaches 14.4 feet above the sea surface. The vessel can run autonomously or be operated from a laptop PC or radio control with data telemetry via a Kongsberg’s K-MATE control system, with communication through Maritime Broadband Radio and Iridium satellite (VSAT optional).
September 4, 2020 — Following several years of decline, the demand for whale meat in Norway is rising. A distribution deal with a national supermarket chain and an increase in domestic tourism due to the coronavirus pandemic are believed to be responsible for the uptick.
Supply has also increased. To address a shrinking fleet, the Norwegian government eased the requirements on whaling vessels this year, a move that has angered conservationists.
Vacationing Norwegians trying out whale
Parts of northern Norway including the Lofoten islands benefited from this year’s travel restrictions that saw Norwegians more accustomed to Mediterranean resorts forced to vacation in their own country. “More and more Norwegians are opening their eyes to whale meat,” reported trade publication Fiskeribladet.
Hopen Fisk in Kabelvåg sold out of their whale meat supply earlier this year. General manager Ernst Iseli said sales “exceeded all expectations”, adding that the demand could be linked to a rising national interest in local cuisine.
While not commonplace elsewhere in the country, whale meat is a speciality in many northern restaurants. The meat is also available in selected Rema 1000 supermarkets across the country.
June 26, 2020 — Consumers around the world will soon be able to know intricate life details of the salmon they eat with a new blockchain initiative from top exporter Norway.
The Norwegian Seafood Association has partnered with International Business Machines Corp. and technology provider Atea ASA to gather data on how salmon is bred, stored and shipped, information that consumers will eventually access by scanning a QR code. That will help Norway’s suppliers differentiate their premium products from other exporters, curb origin fraud and cut waste.
“Blockchain lets us share the fish’s journey from the ocean to the dinner table,” said Alf-Goran Knutsen, chief executive officer of Kvaroy Arctic, a supplier that’s part of the initiative. “This is now more timely than ever.”
June 18, 2020 — Norway said Wednesday it wanted to resume exports of its salmon to China after Beijing appeared to rule it out as a possible source of COVID-19.
Norwegian salmon came under scrutiny after a recently discovered cluster of new coronavirus cases was reportedly traced to the Xinfadi meat market in Beijing and a chopping board used for cutting up imported salmon.
However, Norwegian and, crucially, Chinese health officials appear to have now given the salmon the all-clear.
“We currently have no evidence that salmon is a carrier or an intermediate carrier of the coronavirus,” the deputy director of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Shi Guoqing, said on Tuesday.
Stressing that no case of contamination by food had been reported, the authorities responsible for food safety in Norway said their salmon was fit for consumption.
June 1, 2020 — All ships suffer from fouling: the build-up below the waterline of shellfish, seaweeds and other organisms. This causes drag, which slows the affected craft and increases its fuel consumption. Regular hull cleaning thus makes a considerable difference to the profitability of shipping. It also results in a useful reduction in the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide emitted by the world’s merchant shipping—an industry that many environmentalists think is notoriously dirty and which could therefore do with burnishing its green credentials.
Roar Ådland, a shipping economist at the Norwegian School of Economics, in Bergen, says that a midsized oil tanker’s fuel consumption (and also, consequently, its emission of carbon dioxide) drops by around 9% after its hull is cleaned at sea—something that happens, on average, once every six or seven months. If the cleaning is done in a dry dock, which allows the process to be more thorough, that figure can be as much as 17%.
At the moment, cleaning at sea is done by teams of divers. In recent years, robots have sometimes been added to underwater cleaning crews, and have proved effective. Jotun, a Norwegian coatings company, and Semcon, a Swedish engineering firm, propose, however, to go one step further. They want to replace the divers completely with a machine. That machine, moreover, would not merely defoul a ship’s hull, but stop it fouling up in the first place.
HullSkater, as the consortium dub their invention, is a 200kg hull-crawling robot. It will reside permanently on-board ship, ready to be launched whenever the vessel is stationary—for example, when it is waiting in the roads outside a port for a berth to unload and load. To deploy the robot, it is first lowered overboard by a crane. Its four magnetic wheels, each of which is fitted with a motor, then clamp it to the hull and it can start trundling around. After this, the ship’s crew need do nothing. Wherever the vessel happens to be on the planet, the robot is piloted remotely by an operator on land, who may be half a world away, via a 4g phone connection.
March 23, 2020 — Seafood producers in Norway, spanning both the wild-capture fisheries and aquaculture sectors, will strive to maintain supplies to domestic and overseas markets, with borders and air freight routes remaining open for the transport of goods, the country’s government has said.
Norway has taken drastic steps to halt the spread of COVID-19, with schools, cinemas, restaurants and bars told to close and citizens encouraged to stay at home as much as possible. However, the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Fisheries issued a formal letter on 14 March identifying the value chain supporting food production and delivery as critical functions to society.