Message to the Salmon Seminar in Trondheim Feb 3 and 4, 2010

Sadly, I have to be in North America to look into critical salmon issues and I am unable to join your important conference. But I would like to send you a short message to express my feelings on the Norwegian salmon situation at the beginning of the 2010 decade.

We have prepared a map of the salmon world from the NASF perspective. Take a close look at what it shows and at the few words that highlight the situation in many regions throughout the Atlantic.

Click here to see image to see full size.

The good news is that around 85% of all salmon netsmen and long-liners have now signed up to commercial conservation agreements and are foregoing their historic and sustainable rights to harvest salmon.  Yes, they have voluntarily signed up to help us restore salmon stocks to their historic abundance.
 
The commercial fishermen have meager resources.  Yet, with a little bit of philanthropic help, they have taken a meaningful lead.  Why are they doing this of their own free will?  Because the public sector management has failed them for so long!
 
There are thousands of individual experts in Norway who could, given the chance,  restore the Wild Salmon as a brand in Norway.  But the authorities continue to follow faulty or flawed models.  I believe that the management and conservation of wild salmon is best suited with active private stakeholders and that bureaucratic interference should be as little as possible.  Norway’s official salmon policy will not produce sustainable stocks.  More and more rivers are losing their stocks and there appears to be no real strategy to help restore them.  It is already too late for those Norwegian rivers where the wild stocks are so low that natural recovery will not be possible.  There is very little time left for many rivers that could still be rescued.
 
I am afraid that Minister Solheim has been a disappointment to me.  By continuing the huge sea fishery in Finnmark and stamping his approval on netting that takes fish that should be allowed to return to their Russian and Finnish rivers he is flying in the face of international agreements. In permitting the expansion of salmon farming the Stoltenberg Government is demonstrating its lack of interest in safeguarding the wild fish.  All this, I fear, is impoverishing our common efforts  to protect  wild salmon.


                             Orri