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    [OC] Norway's biggest salmon customer is Poland. But Poland doesn't eat it: it smokes it and ships it to Germany (2025, UN Comtrade)
    Data

    [OC] Norway’s biggest salmon customer is Poland. But Poland doesn’t eat it: it smokes it and ships it to Germany (2025, UN Comtrade)


    Source: UN Comtrade annual data, 2025. Whole salmon HS 030214 + 030313, smoked 030541, fillets 030441/030481.

    Tools: TypeScript pulling the Comtrade API at build time, a hand-drawn SVG map.

    Interactive version: https://salmonradar.com/trade/hidden-legs (disclosure: my site, free, no signup)

    Some things I found:

    • In 2025 Norway sent Poland 190,187 t of whole salmon. Poland's own customs count 172,401 t for the same flow. Each border crossing is recorded twice, and the two sides almost never agree.
    • Poland exported 57,191 t of smoked salmon ($1.15B), and 52% of it went to Germany. That makes up 64% of all the smoked salmon Germany imports.
    • The mirror gets worse downstream. Poland says it sent Germany 29,767 t of smoked salmon, but Germany says it received 16,570 t.
    • Russia has banned Norwegian fish since 2014, as part of its own counter-sanctions. I went looking for a back door through Belarus or Kazakhstan and mostly didn't find one. Kazakhstan imported 6,400 t from Norway and sent Russia 58 t. Russia simply buys from Chile instead: 30,266 t in 2025.
    • A mistake I made along the way: frozen trout (0303.14) sits one digit away from frozen Atlantic salmon (0303.13). Read the wrong line and Armenia looks like a big salmon exporter to Russia. In reality it sent 8,361 t of trout and only 302 t of salmon.

    Posted by ofirhasbani

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    14 Comments

    2. jfk52917 on

      Please, when using AI, review your copy. It’s painfully obvious that you used AI (probably Fable 5.1) to write this. Just write it like you would normally, please, it vastly improves what you’re writing.

    3. DibblerTB on

      Kan man tørke de og selge det til Portugalt? Ja! Kan man røyke det? JA! Og hva ER det DA??

      ..

      En 20 pakning sigaretter?

    8. factotum- on

      Everyone is complaining about the AI text, but no one is complaining about the lack of data visualization, let alone the data itself

    9. oliverjohansson on

      Yeap, I just realised I never ate salmon in Poland nor know anybody who would. Yet all Germans I know ate salmon in all countries I’ve seen them visiting

    12. ButterscotchFancy912 on

      This is due to Norway paying higher tariff on processed fish being outside the customs union of EU ( are in EEA).

    13. 150c_vapour on

      Start further back in the chain and the bio-mass to feed the salmon comes from West Africa where it’s extraction is killing the low end of the coastal food chain there. That biomass gets turned into massive mountains of fecal waste in the waters of Norway.

      [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/04/norwegian-fish-farms-polluting-fjords-with-waste-likened-to-raw-sewage-of-millions-of-people](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/04/norwegian-fish-farms-polluting-fjords-with-waste-likened-to-raw-sewage-of-millions-of-people)