It was an active week on the farmed salmon front. For Norway, the news is good. But for Chile, the news keeps getting worse. While Norway posts record first-quarter salmon exports, Chile continues to grapple with an outbreak of infectious salmon anemia, which has stifled the country's farmed salmon production. This week, Marine Harvest divulged that it halved its number of active farmed salmon sites in Chile to 11 in the first quarter, while AquaChile laid off 450 workers at its Puerto Montt-area processing facilities.
What else caught SeafoodSource readers' attention? Take a glance at this week's most popular stories:
1) It's a record: The Norwegian Seafood Export Council reported that Norwegian salmon exports hit a record NOK 4.8 billion (USD 721.7 million, EUR 545.1 million) in the first quarter of 2009, up 18.7 percent from the same period in 2008. The increase in value is due to an average per-kilogram price increase of NOK 3.60 (USD 0.54, EUR 0.41) and a 10,000-metric-ton jump in the country's farmed salmon production.
2) Destination China: So where's all that Norwegian salmon going? Although nearly three-quarters of Norwegian salmon exporters end up in the European Union, more Norwegian salmon is making its way to China. The China Foreign Trade Bureau said that China's appetite for salmon continues to grow, and demand is expected to increase as much as 40 percent by 2020.
3) Save the bluefin tuna: Perhaps no seafood species symbolizes the sustainable seafood movement more than bluefin tuna. On the eve of the Mediterranean tuna fishery, the World Wildlife Fund released a study that claimed overfishing will wipe out the breeding population of bluefin tuna by 2012 unless the harvest is closed.
4) Smoke screen: The European Union's food safety risk assessor expressed concerns over the safety of smoke flavorings Zesti Smoke Code 10 and Unismoke, which are used for seafood and other meat products. A panel of European Food Safety Authority scientists published the first in a series of opinions on smoke flavorings.
5) Too much shrimp, too few buyers: U.S. shrimp inventories are high, which is stifling demand for the crustacean. The National Marine Fisheries Service reported that U.S. shrimp imports fell nearly 14 percent in February, compared to the same month last year. What's more, shrimp imports from seven of the United States' top 10 shrimp suppliers dropped from the first two months of 2008 to the first two months of 2009.
