Aerial view of a fish farm near Grima Island, outside Skjerjehamn, in western Norway. Fish farming helped Norway produce around 1.18 million metric tons of salmon last year. The scale and value of salmon production is second only to Norway’s oil industry. Hundreds of salmon facilities line Norway’s west coast. Environmental and health issues have the country and this industry facing a crossroad. See story here. Links at fishermensvoice.com add a more comprehensive view to this story. Photo credit: Sergey Ponomarev
Major Lobster Market Upheaval in 2017
by Laurie Schreiber
BAR HARBOR—Thirty million pounds of lobsters lost their usual domestic and overseas markets in 2017.
It’s the job of the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative (MLMC) to find new markets, MLMC Executive Director Matt Jacobson told the Lobster Zone B Council at its meeting on Nov. 28.
The industry’s difficulties came shortly before the completion of a third-party audit of the MLMC, as required by the state legislature when it authorized the formation, with a five-year tenure, of the MLMC in 2013. With the MLMC due to sunset in late 2018, Jacobson went before each of the state’s zone councils to see if they supported the MLMC’s reauthorization for another five years.
“The question before you now is whether we’re better off marketing or better off not marketing,” said Jacobson.
Jacobson said that, with marketing agency Weber Shandwick, retained in 2015, the MLMC developed and deployed strategies to market Maine lobster.
“We also learned what a marketing program can’t do,” he said. That primarily included getting the industry out from under
