Sea, fish, and resource management in the High North

Abstract

With more than five times the land area of the kingdom, Norway’s oceans extend from 55 degrees north in the North Sea to 85 degrees north in the Arctic Ocean north of Svalbard – a distance of more than 3,000 kilometres. More than 80 per cent of these sea areas lies to the north of the Arctic Circle. As for natural resources, these sea areas are very productive and sustain large commercial fisheries. Deep fjords and a sheltered coastline also facilitate a major aquaculture industry. These are the natural starting points for Norway’s position as the world’s tenth largest fishing nation, the world’s largest producer of Atlantic salmon, and the world’s second largest exporter of seafood (FAO 2020). Developments within ocean law in the 1970s led to extended coastal state jurisdiction, the establishment of 200-nautical-mile zones, and new relations among neighbours sharing sea borders (Tamnes 1997). While Norway has three neighbouring countries on land, it has seven at sea and therefore significant foreign policy interests there. Most of the large fish stocks that sustain the Norwegian fishing industry are shared with neighbouring countries, which requires cooperation in the management of resources. Many of these stocks are in the Barents Sea and the Norwegian Sea; therefore, international cooperation on fisheries management is an important dimension of foreign policy in the North. This applies at the circumpolar level through the development of a system to prevent unregulated fishing in the Arctic Ocean, regionally in the management of pelagic stocks in the Norwegian Sea, and bilaterally in the relationship with Russia, with whom Norway has its most economically important and extensive fisheries cooperation. Fish are an important aspect of our foreign policy and always have been (Kolle 2014). Here we look more closely at the role of fisheries management in foreign policy, especially in the North. Norwegian fisheries negotiators annually conduct some 20 rounds of negotiations and consultations with other countries, the most important of which are Russia, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, the UK, and the EU. The total value of the fisheries in these agreements was around NOK 55 billion in 2019, of which around one-third were granted to Norway.