A leading industry analyst has claimed that Iceland is likely to overtake Scottish salmon production levels within six years.
Speaking at the Global Aquaculture Alliances’s Responsible Seafood Conference last week, Gorjan Nikolik, senior seafood analyst at Rabobank, forecast that the growth of the aquaculture sector in Iceland was likely to be one of the major drivers of global salmon growth.
According to The Fish Site, Nikolik said, “I expect Iceland (which harvested 34,000 tonnes in 2020) to become a major producer, maybe even in the next five or six years it will maybe even get to the same level as the Faroe Islands (80,000 tonnes in 2020) or maybe even the UK (192,000 tonnes in 2020).”
Growth in Norwegian production, this year, was likely to reach 10.2 per cent. “This was actually quite a surprise for a lot of people and is based on, to a large extant, very good biology, some large smolt utilisation, but also as they moved a part of their production from 2020 to 2021.”
Talking about Chile, Nikolik said that the well documented drop in production meant that total production was likely to total 14.1 per cent below 2020’s levels. This was largely due to reductions in the numbers of smolt being stocked during the year. However, he forecasts that it will bounce back by 8.8 percent in 2022, by which time it would be back to pre-pandemic levels.
