Cross-ownership in the Icelandic seafood industry and the potential effects on UK supply: A Matis report for Seafish and the Grimsby Seafood Cluster ...

• Main Authors: Viðarsson, Jónas R., Þórðarson, Gunnar
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2020
• Subjects: ITQ; consolidation; optimisation; cross ownership; Iceland
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3903222; https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.3903222

This report is commissioned by Seafish and the Grimsby seafood cluster in the UK with the aim to get and overall understanding of connections and dependencies in ownership of the largest seafood companies in Iceland, and how these can potentially affect supply to the UK. Quota consolidation has been a feature of Iceland‘s fisheries sector since 1991, when the government introduced individual transferable quotas (ITQs) across all species. This allowed some companies to buy up quotas from others, and catch them in a way which, in theory, ought to be more efficient. The concept is that overall economic return from the resource will be maximised by allowing for such optimisation. Now, almost three decades later, the economy of scale has resulted in extreme consolidation across the seafood sector, where smaller companies have merged into larger ones or been bought up by the big vertically integrated seafood companies. The catching and processing sectors have been going through major development phase in recent ... : Funding: SEAFISH (SEA 8451) ...