Orri Vigfússon
Icelandic vodka magnate and keen angler who campaigned to save the wild Atlantic salmon
ORRI VIGFÚSSON, who has died aged 74, was an Icelandic businessman who made his fortune selling vodka to the Russians, and a keen angler credited with saving the wild North Atlantic salmon from extinction. The salmon, Salmo salar, emerges from eggs and grows in fresh water and then swims away to sea before returning to spawn again as an adult on the river where it began life. In the 1950s it was discovered that salmon from rivers in America, Canada and Europe congregated in large numbers off the coast of Greenland and the Faroe Islands. A lucrative, unrestricted commercial fishing operation soon sprang into action. Before long, however, with so many salmon unable to return to rivers to breed, numbers fell dramatically.
Vigfússon had first became aware of the plight of the salmon in the early 1980s when rod catches in Iceland fell by more than half in just six years. “I thought, ‘My God, the salmon will disappear in my lifetime’,” he recalled. An inter-governmental body, the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organisation (Nasco), had been set up to regulate catches but, as Vigfússon recalled, it was largely ineffective.
As the owner of the premium vodka brand Icy and a board member of Iceland’s biggest bank, Islandsbanki, Vigfússon had the clout and contacts to do something about the problem. In 1989 he used some of his wealth to establish the North Atlantic Salmon Fund (NASF), which went on to raise millions of pounds from conservationists and sport anglers.
His guiding principle was that commercial fishermen have the right to earn a living, so those who volunteered to stop salmon fishing should receive fair compensation and help in finding alternative employment. Vigfússon then approached governments to convince them to lend their support.
He had his first success in 1991 when he negotiated the buying up of commercial salmon quotas from fishermen in the Faroe Islands. A quota buy-out was subsequently agreed with fishermen in Greenland in 1993, then in Iceland in 1996. He went on went on to broker multi-million dollar buyouts or moratorium agreements throughout the region and worked to find less environmentally damaging work for those whose livelihoods were affected. For example, he helped Greenland’s fishermen become the world’s largest exporters of lumpfish roe.
In Britain in 2003, a £3.4 million buy-out deal with 68 drift-net fishermen in northeast England (whereby the government provided one-third of the money while NASF raised the other two-thirds and handled the negotiations), was hailed as the most important salmon conservation measure for 30 years. The drift-netsmen had been taking nearly 44,000 salmon a year – equivalent to half the salmon caught in England and Wales by rod and line.
Some were slow in heeding the message. After calculating that Ireland probably earned $6 million to $8 million from their commercial salmon fishing activities, but would probably be able to generate revenues of $200 million by turning to the sport fishing industry, he took out a full-page advertisement in the Irish Times, which argued that even a child could understand why a £80-million industry is better than a £2-million industry, so why couldn’t the Irish government?
In 2014 Vigfússon accused Scotland’s first minister Alex Salmond of “hypocrisy” after he had pledged support to Scotland’s £134 million angling industry, while at the same time helping one of Scotland’s biggest netting firms to secure a European grant allowing it to expand its operations off the east coast. When in July 2015 the Scottish government announced that it was proposing to ban “the taking of salmon outwith inland waters”, it was said to have done so only because it faced a substantial fine for failing to comply with the EU Habitats directive.
Although measures to regulate the exploitation of wild stocks have not stemmed the overall decline of the fish (other reasons include reckless marine salmon farming), it is estimated that the commercial conservation agreements negotiated by Vigfússon now cover 85 per cent of the waters which the Atlantic salmon inhabits, and that between five and 10 million salmon have been saved to return to their rivers of birth to spawn.
In Vigfússon’s native Iceland, thanks to a 20-year ban on netting, widespread catch and release and low levels of fish farming, Iceland’s anglers have enjoyed record seasons since 2005. “My dream,” Vigfússon told an interviewer in 2003, “is to bring salmon back to the great rivers of Europe like the Loire, the Rhine and the Dee in the abundance we saw 100 or 200 years ago.”
Orri Vigfússon was born on July 10 1942 at Siglufjördur, a herring station in north west Iceland: “When I was growing up, my family had a herring fishery. Like most, we overfished the herring stocks and they collapsed. Maybe that taught me about how not to manage the salmon stocks.”
Vigfússon was educated in Icelandic schools before moving to London where he took a degree in Business Studies at the London School of Economics in 1964.
Back in Iceland he went into business establishing small rural cottage industries. In the 1970s an Icelandic sweater proved popular with hippies. Then in the 1980s he founded Icy vodka, a premium brand which sold well in the US and Russia.
Vigfússon served as chairman of Icelandic Opera and trustee chairman of the Migratory Salmon Foundation UK. He was an honorary life member of the Flyfishers’ Club, London, honorary president of the Icelandic Angling Club, London, and patron of the South West Rivers Association, UK.
In 2004 Time Magazine named him a “European Hero” and in 2007 he was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize – the world’s biggest prize for grass roots conservation programmes. He also won the a conservation award from the Prince of Wales and in 2013 the French Government appointed him Chevalier du mérite agricole.
He is survived by his wife Unnur Kristinsdóttir and their two children.
Orri Vigfússon, born July 10 1942, died July 1 2017