Greetings from the Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture

I want to express my appreciation to all those attending the conference on Cod farming in the Nordic Countries and welcome you to this event.  Your contribution to research and development of this new industry is important and highly appreciated by the Icelandic Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture. 

This is the third conference on cod farming in the Nordic Countries held in Reykjavík.  In the first one held in 2005 there were high hopes about cod farming.  There had been a breakthrough in production of juveniles, selective breeding had started and many research projects on cod farming were ongoing.  In Norway which was the leading country several hatcheries had been built with the capacity of producing several million juveniles.  At that time leading scientists and producers in Norway made a prognosis that within the next 10-15 years the production of farmed cod would reach levels similar to those of farmed salmon.

This year the world production of farmed cod is about 20 thousand tons and decreasing. In Norway only three cod hatcheries remain and only 10 on-growing farms. Clearly some problems still remain to be solved before the cod farming industry can start to grow again.  Many of these problems are the same in different countries and therefore international cooperation is important in finding solutions. The challenge of this conference is to define important biological challenges and bottlenecks in cod farming, get the industrial view of the current setback and think about where to go from here.  

I would like to thank all those who have helped to organize this conference and I am certain that it will make an important contribution to the development of cod farming.

Jón Bjarnason

Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture