Norway weighing up China trout ruling

NORWAY is still waiting to see how China’s new ruling that rainbow trout can be classified as salmon will impact on its future export performance.
The decision has taken the aquaculture sector by surprise and left it somewhat bemused, especially in Norway.
Victoria Braathen, who heads Norway’s export mission in Beijing, told the broadcaster NRK it was too early to say what the consequences would be for the country’s salmon companies.
But she pointed out that China also has a generic term that covered most white fish species. Most of China’s trout is bred in Tibet.
However, Sigurd Stefansson, a salmon expert at the University of Bergen, said: ‘While the two may be related, they are not the same. You cannot label rainbow trout as salmon.’
But Professor Zhu Chunhua at the Guangdong Ocean University thinks that the new labelling is sufficient for ordinary consumers who, he claimed, were often not fully aware of what they were eating.
He said the alternative was to import large amounts of salmon from Europe, but that was not a practical solution.
The new ruling came into effect more than a week ago. Consumers had been complaining that they were being deceived after it was revealed up to a third of salmon being sold was in fact trout.
The China Aquatic Products, Processing and Marketing Alliance, along with 13 fishery companies, then decided to legitimise the practice rather than ban it.
They said that salmon is an umbrella name for a species ‘in the family of Salmonidae’ which includes rainbow trout.
Also, the Chinese Aquaculture Association has dismissed public criticism by saying that all fish grown in China meet the strictest conditions.
China is a major producer of both species. Norwegian salmon exports, while increasing, are still small by comparison and there is still a block on supplies from some of Norway’s larger companies.
So far this year, salmon exports have amounted to just 7,500 tonnes, a small proportion of Norway’s total salmon exports.