Black Sea trout wins converts

Sitting in his spacious office with a view of the Black Sea, Tayfun Denizer smiles: His rainbow trout, raised in submerged cages, have made him a wealthy man.

- RÉMI BANET

"Our exports surged from $500,000 in 2017 to $86 million last year, and this is just the beginning," said Mr Denizer, general manager of Polifish, one of the Black Sea's main producers of what is marketed as "Turkish salmon".

In its infancy just a decade ago, production of trout — which in Turkey is almost exclusively farmed for export — has exploded in line with the global demand for salmon, despite criticism of the intensive aquaculture required to farm it.

Last year, the country exported more than 78,000 tonnes of trout raised in its cooler northern Black Sea waters, a figure 16 times higher than in 2018.

And it brought in almost $498 million for Turkish producers, a number set to increase but is still far from the $12.8 billion netted by Norwegian salmon and trout giants in the same year.

Russia, which banned Norwegian salmon in 2014 after the West imposed sanctions over its annexation of Crimea, accounts for 74.1% of “Turkish salmon” exports, followed by Vietnam with 6.0%, and then Belarus, Germany and Japan.

'SPECTACULAR SUCCESS'

Stale Knudsen, an anthropologist at Norway's Bergen University and a specialist on Black Sea fishing, said Russia offered “an available market that was easy to access, near Turkey”.