Is there 'too much cod' on the global market?

"We can almost say there is too much cod," Webjorn Barstad of Norwegian fishing company Strand told IntraFish.

"Fishermen have been reporting for some years that the stock is more healthy than the scientists were saying and Fiskebat has been arguing for some time that we should be taking more cod," Barstad said.

"It’s not ideal when the stock of cod, which is the largest predator, rises to levels that can be seen as too high. It’s also not a full utilization of the resources at our disposal," he said, adding that the cod stock consumes an estimated amount of fish roughly three times the amount caught by Norwegian fishermen.

While the stock is healthy, the composition of it is not clear and it could be that there is an unhealthy mix of mature to juvenile cod, and the situation is further complicated as cod will feed on smaller cod when other food sources are no longer abundant.

"They have a very diverse diet -- capelin, herring, redfish, haddock, shrimp -- as well as smaller cod," Barstad said.

"So there are serious implications for the management of other stocks. Industry is critical of anagement now, especially with the decline in haddock and we have seen evidence of this with pictures of fishermen opening large cod to find four or five decent-sized haddock falling out.

Strand is in the process of saying goodbye to its filleting operations with the new Havbryn delivered in April and the Havstrand due to follow in a few weeks. These are H&G vessels, unlike the filleter trawlers they replace – and the reason is costs.

"Prices are terrible and filleting is expensive," Barstad said, adding that the medium and large cod their vessels land is sold mostly for saltfish and dried fish production in Norway, while smaller fish are exported and find their way to processors in Europe or China -- and the largest proportion of their catches is medium and large fish, plus there is a very large amount of these big fish coming from Russia.

Cod prices halved

"The cod price is less than half of what it was 12-16 months ago. Prices fell sharply in the second half of last year and continued to decline into the first quarter of this year," Barstad said.

"Prices are so low that if we didn’t have the volume, fishing wouldn’t be cost effective and many operators would simply stop.

"At this level it is unsustainable, and I don’t understand why, as fish is not that much cheaper to the consumer, if at all. We have not had lower prices than these for 30-35 years. We are back at 1970s levels," he said, adding that no other prices are that low and for an operator in Norway this is especially difficult as they are using services in a working environment alongside the oil industry, and often paying oil industry prices.

"At this level it is not sustainable," he said, and that Strand’s groundfish operations this year will hardly show a profit and they will be satisfied to break even.

"We hope the situation will stabilize in the second half of this year – it needs to."