The seafood industry, with aquaculture making up more than 70% of the value, is important for Norway and its coastal communities. In 2022, the seafood industry contributed more than 120 billion NOK to the Norwegian GDP, employing around 106 000 employees divided between the industry itself and the associated supplier and services industries.
While aquaculture production and marketing has been highly successful, a common concern is that little value adding activities in the sector takes place at home.
The purpose of this project is to investigate how the success of the Norwegian aquaculture industry interacts with and can support the domestic processing industry.
The project will focus on the role of trade, primarily in salmon, for the domestic processing industry. Specifically, we investigate aquaculture and processing along four dimensions.
First, we will investigate the characteristics and trends in foreign processing of salmon and trout, with a particular focus on third country processing. This will provide information on the competitiveness of domestically processed seafood.
Second, we will investigate how trade networks and product portfolios of aquaculture exporting firms support the growth and quality selection of processed seafood in international markets.
Third, we quantify the economic impact of differential tariffs for domestically processed seafood. This will inform on how tariffs affect the competitiveness of the domestic processing sector.
Finally, we will investigate the benefits of industrial clusters in aquaculture and seafood processing, as well as industry consolidation in domestic processing.
This will provide insights with respect to the role of domestic processing clusters and its impact on local labor markets. Our hypothesis is that lessons learned from aquaculture can have broader application for the processing industry. In this project we aim to reveal how the aquaculture success might benefit the domestic seafood sector and communities.
