1. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dimitry Medvedev threw the seafood industry (along with a few other industries, too) into a panic in August when they announced a trade ban against, among other things, seafood imports from Western nations, including the EU, Australia, Canada, Norway and the United States. These countries had already accused Russia of contributing to the instability in Ukraine, and issued economic sanctions against Russia. Putin and Medvedev said the trade ban was in response to those sanctions.
That spelled trouble for countries like Norway, which suddenly had to find a new market to sell an estimated 100,000 metric tons of farmed salmon in the coming year. What followed was a combination of partnering with third-party nations as intermediary processors to get around the ban and an acrobatic shifting of product from one market to another.
Today, things seem to have stabilized, but whether Putin can keep up this industrial staring contest is anybody’s guess. Without the food trade, Russia now has less to feed its citizens with, and with a petrochemical-heavy economy, plummeting oil prices are pushing Russia deep into the, ahem, red.
