It's a good time to be a salmon farmer. For a sushi lover, however? Not so much.
The reason for the price increase is mainly because of an outbreak of parasitic sea lice among Norway's salmon farms. As a result, salmon production in Norway is poised to drop 5 percent in the early part of 2016. Norway is the supplier for about half of the world's salmon, a fish that has become popular in food establishments. It can be eaten raw in sushi or smoked as hors d'oeuvres.
"Consumers will have to pay more for salmon in the future than they've done so far because we don't expect any growth in production, at least within the next two years," said Paul Aandahl, an analyst at the Norwegian Seafood Council.
Since October of last year, the export of salmon soared to as much as 53 percent to 61.64 krone per kilogram, or $3.25 a pound - the highest price in three decades, according to the Seafood Council and Nordea Bank in Oslo. But it does not stop there. Those figures are expected to surge to about $5.30 a pound this year, and about $5.50 a pound by 2017, said Kolbjiorn Giskeodegard, a senior analyst for Nordea, a financial services company in Stockholm, Sweden.
The European Union was flooded with a surplus of about 100,000 tons of extra salmon since the import ban. It can be recalled that the EU placed a ban on exports to Russia because of its activity in Ukraine. This meant that the country of almost 145 million people was not able to purchase salmon from Norway. As a result, European consumers got used to eating salmon at cheaper rates, with their consumption rising to 1.1 million tons, Seafood Council data showed. The US, on the other hand, had 30,000 tons of extra salmon from Canada.
"Prices in the key European and US salmon markets fell 10 to 20 per cent in 2015, mainly due to massive oversupply," he said. He also added, "In 2016, we see lower supply from Norway and Chile as we now estimate three per cent lower global harvesting."
Therefore, consumers can expect limited supplies of the fish in grocery stores, or smaller pieces of salmon on their sushi.
