The Russian government is pushing to develop the seafood industry in the four inhabited Kuril Islands, luring investors with unprecedented tax breaks in an attempt to drive local economic expansion.
The Kuril Islands, located between northern Japan and Russia’s Far Eastern Sakhalin peninsula, are administratively a part of the Sakhalin regional government. Four of the islands in the archipelago are more populated and developed than the others, and many of the islands have been the focus of a decades-long dispute between Russia and Japan over ownership.
Since the decline of the Soviet Union, the four most populated areas of the Kuril Islands – the Habomai Islets, Shikotan, Kunashir (called Kunashiri in Japan) and Iturup – had been experiencing a steady decline in economic activity, massive out-migration of its residents, and rapidly deteriorating infrastructure.
In response to the decline, in the 2010s the Russian government launched a series of economic stimulation programs to boost local production and renovation, a move taken after Western companies imposed sanctions on Russia after it annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014. In 2017, Russia created a special zone of economic development on the islands called “The Kurils” to attract new investors, with a special focus on attracting two main industries: Tourism and seafood.
The seafood industry already has a big presence in the oceans nearby. The waters of the Japan Sea (the East Sea), the Kuril straits, and the southern part of the Sea of Okhotsk – Russia’s largest source of wild-caught fish and crab – contain a wide range of commercially sought-after species. Targeted species in the region include pollock, salmon, cod, mackerel, grenadier, sardine iwashi, crabs, sea hedgehog, prawns, saury, perch, squids, and seaweed.
The southern Kuril Islands, in particular, house an abundance of seafood thanks to its location: a combination of cold and warm water streams and a few other natural factors cause the benthic layer of the ocean to move upward from the sea bed, carrying nutrient-rich waters with it. While no public data on the fisheries in the southern and northern zones of the islands is available for recent years, data for the period spanning 2003 to 2010 and for 2018 and 2019 paint a clear picture of the successful harvests.