Salmon farmers have joined forces to create a new organisation to address global challenges to the industry.
The Global Salmon Initiative (GSI) is based in Trondheim, Norway, and will represent the interests of 70% of the world’s salmon farms.
It aims to make significant progress towards fully realising a shared goal of "providing a highly sustainable source of healthy protein to feed a growing population", while minimising environmental footprint and continuing to improve social contribution by the industry.
GSI also wants to focus on biosecurity issues which are a huge concern to the industry. It wants to prioritise its efforts on the sea lice issue. Sea lice have a detrimental effect on the health and welfare of infected fish and can reduce productivity of a fish farm.
To this end, the organisation will be implementing best practice measures across all of its farms, which will include increasing industry cooperation on zone management strategies and synchronised treatments.
Approximately 60% of the world’s salmon production is farmed, and in 2011 1,600,000 tonnes of salmon came from farms, while 930,000 tonnes of wild salmon were caught.
Partners in the GSI include global fish feed producers Skretting and Bio Mar.
More information from www.globalsalmoninitiative.org
