Name: How Russia's War Made King Crab Big Business in Norway
Uploaded: 2024-08-21T11:23:09.000Z
Duration: 9 min 2 s
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In 1991, the 300-person village of Bugenes along Norway's far northern border with

The cod population had collapsed, depriving fishermen of income and the town of its only industry.

Around the same time the town placed an ad in the national newspaper looking to move all of its inhabitants to anywhere that would take them, a prehistoric-looking crustacean started showing up in the nets of local fishermen.

Thanks to this invasive transplant, exported to Russia's west coast in the Stalin-era

Soviet Union, and the invasion of Ukraine decades later, the village's fortunes have reversed.

King crab came as a menace, but has been a savior.

All the countries is very hungry for crabs.

You can sell something for 700 kronors or 70 dollars from your fishing boat.

Of course, that's big money, and in Bugenes you measure success in how many millionaires you have there.

It's a total shift in how you do fisheries.

In 2022, Russia controlled 94% of the market for king crab.

That was until the nation's invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions on Russian seafood that came with it.

Now there was only one place for the Western world to buy it.

Once hated by the locals of Bugenes, suspicious that it was responsible for the decline in the population of cod, red king crab became an industry worth billions, a delicacy complete with foodie influencers singing its praises.

Hey foodie fam, if you love crab, this is your new favorite spot.

In the harbor where once three boats were docked, now there are hundreds.

Norway exported almost all of the 5.4 million pounds of king crab it caught in 2023, a 42% annual increase worth 110 million dollars.

One of the fishermen hauling in these mammoths is Erling Haugen.

So me and Tolef are owning this boat together, and I have another boat, it's an old boat.

The first five years, it was nearly bankrupt every year, and I've been a fisherman for about 12 years now.

Before that I was starting with the Norwegian king crab factory, and I stayed there for about three, four years.

And then I understand that the fishermen have better days than I have, so then I quit and start fishing.

It's really cold, it's about 6 plus today.

It's a lot of crabs who have just molted.

You see here, these crabs we are throwing back to the sea, they have two damage here.

As with damage there, damage to the small legs here, and then they have a very, very small claw.

So when they are losing their legs, it will grow out again, and this is a good quality crab.

Apart from sanctions against Russia, prices for these bottom dwellers have remained sky high because of quotas put into place to keep the crab population healthy.

It's totally fair because it's overfished.

It's about 60% lesser quota than last year.

It's about 730 kilos this year, and last year it was 2,300, yeah.

Along with the shipping of live king crab, a cottage industry of tourism has sprung up in the region for those who want to fish for themselves.

Advertisements for king crab safaris dot the landscape.

That is plastic industry, it's a kind of Disneyland.

I'm not 100% sure, but some of them are catching crabs, place it on the waiting pods, and then they're going over to tourists and, wow, look, here is a lot of crabs.

But they already have catch it, so it's tricky things.

Tourism and quotas are something that the mayor of nearby Kirkenes sees as a part of building a sustainable region.

Welcome to the most exciting city in the world, in Europe.

You're now three and a half hours away from Sevemorsk, where the Northern Fleet and Russian nuclear subs are at port.

If you're a municipality experiencing optimism in fish farming and fishery, this is the place to be, and this is the place to visit.

You have to have some principles in politics.

If you base your politics on populism, in the end, you will hurt yourself.

My freedom stops where your freedom starts, and without quotas for king crab, it will not be sustainable, and then we're stealing from the future generations.

With tourism, more money flows into our society.

More people get a job, a high-paying job, an exciting job.

So I believe that if we try to build a bigger travel industry, we as well build a more modern and urban society.

The fish factory went bankrupt in the late 80s.

Along the coastline of Finnmark, many factories went bankrupt.

It was closed for many years, and then it was only the building standing left.

Today's owners bought the factory and started this development of the way of buying crabs, keep them alive inside the factory for days, weeks.

So these barrels are now packed with crabs, king crabs.

There is 225, 230 kilo-ish of king crabs inside.

We have seawater flowing in, and also added air so the crabs can survive during the stay in there.

And then when the truck arrives, we put these barrels into the truck, and also in the truck we have air hoses which we connect.

We are driving for two and a half, three days, so the crabs stay alive.

I would say that our parents' generation fed us with frozen seafood, and now the younger generation want to have the knowledge where the seafood or the food is coming from.

We are tagging every individual crab we have.

Into that QR code we are using, we are adding information about the fishermen, we are adding some history into that, telling the fishermen's story, and also the size of the crabs.

And now you can see this is a strong, vital crab.

I can feel his legs are full of meat, 80 to 90 percent fill.

What is the weight on this one, let's see, 2.5 kilo.

You can find the catch of date, the tag number, and also this is, let's say, cold when you are selling this crab, yeah.

Despite sanctions against Russia, Russian crab keeps making its way into Western markets.

In 2019, Norwegian police uncovered a network that was illegally catching and exporting 100,000 pounds of Red King crab.

Organized crime is organized crime, and people that openly violate sanctions against Russia are making money on the blood spilled in Ukraine.

When you have such an extremely fine product as a King crab, it's a high-cost product, it's for the high-end restaurants, then there will always be bad apples.

With this product, of course, the income for fishermen are more predictable, and that money is going back to the local society.

So the King crab in the past, and today, and in the future, is creating jobs in this small society.

With the King crab, you have a sure income.

It's easier to fish with King crab pods than with traditional cod fishing.

The revenue is huge, and the profits are huge.

It gives a small society like Søvranger, and especially Bugenäs, a strong pillar of economy.

It's unknown how sturdy that pillar can be.

Snow and King crab fisheries in Alaska have been suspended in recent years due to high temperatures beyond what the species can take.

According to a 2018 study, temperatures around the Barents Sea have sharply increased since the mid-2000s.

We know that the seawater temperature is going up.

 But it's, of course, difficult to say if this species, King crab, is affected by that.

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How Russia's War Made King Crab Big Business in Norway

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