Fishing industry in Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Russia's fishing industry claims a coastline ranked fourth longest on Earth, behind only Canada, Greenland, and Indonesia. That coastline opens onto twelve seas across three oceans, the landlocked Caspian Sea, and more than two million rivers. In 2005, according to the FAO, Russian fishers pulled roughly 3.19 million tonnes from wild fisheries and another 114,752 tonnes from aquaculture, enough to rank ninth globally at 2.3 percent of world production. The officially recorded annual value of all that fishing sits at around five billion US dollars, equal to 0.3 percent of GDP. The questions worth asking are not simply how Russia catches so much fish, but why so much of it leaves the country unprocessed, why the fleet doing the catching is crumbling, and how a nation with some of the richest waters on the planet ended up importing nearly a million tonnes of seafood a year to feed its own cities.

• 2. The Regulatory Maze

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  The federal law "On Fisheries and Protection of Aquatic Biological Resources," passed in December 2004, divided Russian fishing into three categories: industrial, recreational, and subsistence fishing by indigenous groups. It required that total allowable catch levels be set for each stock, defined as the scientifically justified annual harvest of a given species in a given area. Then, without explanation, the same law stated that industrial fisheries were not necessarily bound by those limits. Pacific salmon was identified as the main species that would probably operate without a hard catch cap, relying instead on regulated fishing effort.

  The Fishing Rules, called Pravila rybolovstva and written separately for each geographical region, were meant to fill the gap. They specified seasonal closures, closed areas, mesh-size restrictions, minimum catch sizes, and allowable bycatch limits. Parliamentarians and stakeholders still criticized the law for its gaps, and legislators anticipated that at least two more federal laws would be needed: one on coastal fisheries and one on aquaculture. Ships built or serviced outside the Eurasian Economic Union face significant restrictions on landing catch in Russian waters, and from 2022 they are cut off from quota allocations entirely.

• 3. Institutional Collapse

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  Starting in 1992, the federal agency responsible for fishery management was reorganized at least five times. The head of that authority was replaced seven times, and not one of those seven was a fisheries professional. The core issue of fishing capacity was never genuinely confronted during those years of revolving leadership.

  The consequences ran all the way to the docks. Getting a licence to use water for aquaculture and obtaining the required sanitary certificates was so time-consuming that investment was routinely discouraged. The paperwork burden for a vessel to call at a Russian port and land its catch was heavy enough that coastal processing was simply bypassed. Ships exported fish raw and unprocessed rather than deal with domestic bureaucracy. Imports climbed from 424,000 tonnes in the early 1990s to nearly one million tonnes by the mid-2000s. Domestic supply fell from 3.3 million tonnes to a record low of 2.5 million tonnes over that same period. The 2003 "Concept for Development of the Fishing Industry of the Russian Federation to 2020" was the government's formal acknowledgment of failure, followed in 2009 by an effective ban on the bareboat charter contracts that had locked Russian companies into delivering catch to foreign buyers.

• 4. A Rusting Fleet

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  In 2002, the Russian State Marine Register counted roughly 2,500 offshore fishing vessels, 366 transport vessels, and 46 factory ships. About two-thirds of those fishing vessels did not meet basic safety standards. Capital investment in the industry had dropped thirty percent by 2000 compared to 1990. The number of qualified specialists in fishing, navigation, and processing fell by thirty to forty percent over the same decade.

  The Barents Sea cod fishery became the clearest illustration of what an aged fleet costs in practice. Between 2002 and 2005, elderly freezing trawlers made up forty percent of effort in the demersal fishery but produced only twenty-five percent of the official catch. They were one and a half times less effective than the other vessels in the fleet. Equivalent modern trawlers are three to four times as productive. The low efficiency of those older vessels also implicated them in illegal, unreported, and unregulated catch, since tight economics created incentives to underreport landings. By 2019, Norebo, owned by Vitaly Orlov, stood as the largest fishing holding in Russia. Its sixteen companies reported 58.2 billion rubles in combined revenue that year, making it the only fishing company on the Forbes list of Russia's largest privately owned firms.

• 5. Inland Waters

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  Lake Baikal spans 31,700 square kilometres; Ladoga reaches 19,100; Onega covers 9,700. Russia's rivers run to more than two million, the largest in order being Severnaya Dvina, Pechora, Dnieper, Volga, Ob, Don, Yenisei, Lena, Kolyma, Indigirka, and Amur. The official inland catch in 2005 was 72,000 tonnes across sixty species. The Ob-Irtysh River Basin alone contributed 19,200 tonnes, about twenty-seven percent of the national inland total. In volume terms, whitefish of the family Coregonidae, cyprinids, zanders, and perch dominated.

  Sturgeon tells a starkest story. Once commercially significant in the Caspian and Azov basins, Siberian rivers, and the Amur, sturgeon stocks are now heavily depleted and face constant poaching pressure. The Caspian Sea is also home to the biggest inland water in the country. Lake Baikal's endemic omul, a whitefish, remains commercially fished and is sold smoked at the market in Listvyanka. Indigenous peoples across the Pacific coast, northern Siberia, and the great lake regions are legally restricted to using their catch for local consumption only. They may not sell it. In practice, that restriction is not always observed, partly because poverty leaves people with few alternatives.

• 6. Stocks and Illegal Trade

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  The FAO grouped Russian stock declines into four distinct causes. Natural fluctuation alone drove Pacific pilchard down. A combination of natural fluctuation and overfishing harmed Atlantic and Pacific herring, Alaska pollock, and Barents Sea capelin. Overfishing combined with ongoing illegal catch pushed sturgeons, Atlantic salmon, red king crab, and sea cucumber into serious depletion. Marine pollution compounding overfishing hit whitefish and salmon in the Pechora drainage basin, whitefish and sturgeon in the Ob drainage basin, and most species across the Amur Basin. The Black and Caspian Seas faced ecosystem transformation driven by invasive species affecting sprat populations.

  Russian illegal exporters maintained well-established networks connecting them to importers in Japan, China, and South Korea. The short distances from south Sakhalin and the south Kurils to Japan made those links difficult to disrupt. Criminal groups and corruption amplified the effect. Large fish-processing facilities in China, built on cheaper labour, sustained a steady pull for unprocessed Russian fish. Poverty in fishing communities fed individual poaching, which in turn fed the larger industrial illegal catch, producing what analysts described as a vicious cycle. Russia remains a major global exporter of pollock, cod, and herring, yet its import dependency on salmon is notable: eighty-five percent of domestically harvested salmon comes from the Far East, while consumption is spread across the whole country, making domestic logistics expensive and unpredictable.

• 7. Aquaculture and the Research Base

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  By 2007, three hundred aquaculture enterprises operated across Russia, commercially cultivating over sixty species of fish, invertebrates, and seaweed. The industry centred on buffalo carp, grass carp, silver carp, rainbow trout, scallops, mussels, and laminaria. Freshwater aquaculture produced about 100,000 tonnes between 2003 and 2006, concentrated in northwest European Russia, the Far East, and southern Siberia. Marine aquaculture was almost entirely in Primorye Province on the Sea of Japan coast, where farms covered 10,000 hectares in 2006 and produced 1,340 tonnes, mainly laminaria, blue mussel, and the scallop Mizuhopecten yessoensis.

  The untapped potential was considerably larger. Russia held 960,000 hectares of agricultural water bodies, 143,000 hectares of ponds, and additional cage-farming capacity in large lakes and reservoirs. The National Project on Agricultural Sector Development set a 2020 target of 1.4 million tonnes from freshwater aquaculture and 400,000 tonnes from mariculture, with the federal government considering a subsidy of two-thirds of the credit needed to build or modernise facilities. Research to support all of this was coordinated by VNIRO, the central fishery institute in Moscow. In 2007, previously independent institutes became subordinate branches of VNIRO, among them Saint Petersburg-based GIPRORYBFLOT, which specialised in vessel technologies and fish processing, and VIERH in Moscow, focused on economic research. Around 120 aquaculture specialists graduated annually from Russian universities as of that year, a pipeline that would need to grow considerably to meet the ambitions spelled out in the 2020 targets.