**6. Structural developments and management trends in aquaculture**

The new promises and threats of the technological developments provide a backdrop also for this section, which is aimed at combining technology and structural trends. The general structural trends in aquaculture are similar to those in agriculture and animal husbandry worldwide, that is to say moving away from public funding and small scale enterprises towards merging, privatization and internationalization. In this section we briefly account for these trends and then in section eight, we point to some of the implications this may have for management and sustainable development in aquaculture.

In Norway, salmon and trout breeding programs were started with public financing in 1971 by a non-profit research institute (Gjøen & Bentsen, 1997). The base populations of these programs were collected from Norwegian rivers (Atlantic salmon) and from Scandinavian farmed populations (rainbow trout) and these breeding populations were transferred in 1985 to a cooperative ownership by salmon farmers' organizations. However, as a result of an economic crisis in the late 1980s, this activity was transferred to a shareholder company in 1992 (at present Aqua Gen AS). At that time it was decided that the value of the breeding material should be secured in a way that took care of the public interest; hence the structure of ownership was divided between private and public shareholders, but that structure was only bound for a five years period. With the next government the largest public shareholder was turned into a private venture company, who in 2007 decided to sell its shares in Aqua Gen AS. The German EW Group, which is also the holding company of the world's leading poultry genetic companies (Aviagen), concluded an agreement to take majority ownership of the shares in Aqua Gen AS. Thus, the Ministry of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs (FKD) gradually lost control over the material from the originally public supported breeding programme for salmon.

Currently, the Norwegian legal system is unclear on regulating genetic material originating in the wild or coming from public breeding programmes and hence a comprehensive management system for aquatic genetic resources is not in place. The sale of Aqua Gen AS to German EW Group is illustrative of the dilemma. This breeding material can now in theory be patented and removed from the public domain. The development has moved from a situation of public control and ownership, via a cooperative situation, to the current situation of increasingly dominating market actors. This raises question about eventual effects of recent Norwegian access regulations in the Nature Diversity Act and the Marine Wild Species Act. The situation has raised questions about the need to regulate access to wild or breeding material in other species, as cod and halibut, because a similar level of international exchange has not taken place for these other species of fish.

Since the early 1990s, public support for Norwegian farm animal breeding has decreased, reflecting a political will to privatize breeding. A counter trend is the initiative from the Ministry of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs to fund the establishment of a breeding program for cod at the research institute, Nofima in Tromsø. In line with the policy goal of safeguarding rural settlements, this may reflect an intact willingness to finance development of breeding programmes in Norway, at least in the districts of Northern Norway. The current official goal is to retain the cod breeding material and associated competence and knowledge bases that are being built up as a Norwegian public good asset. The end goal may be that cod, like salmon, is intended to become profitable and commercialised at some point down the line, but the legal process of how to deal with this has only just started (interview NN1).
