Three decades after San Diego’s famed tuna industry crumbled, an Icelandic entrepreneur is attempting to rebuild the city as a world tuna capital.
Unlike tuna fishers of the 20th Century, Oli Steindorsson isn’t pinning his hopes on the wild harvest of northern bluefin. Instead, his company recently purchased a major tuna farm in Baja California and established its corporate headquarters in a high-rise near Little Italy.
From the 11th floor, Steindorsson can see San Diego Bay, once home to the tuna fleet, and dream about expanding his business into Southern California waters. Today, domestic ocean aquaculture is tangled in red tape, but the Obama administration is rewriting the rules to encourage the development of fish farms.
“This used to be the tuna capital of the world, and what is more appropriate than relocating here because of that,” said Steindorsson, chief executive of Umami Sustainable Seafood. “The hope is that one day we will be allowed to copy and paste these production (techniques) from the Mexico waters into the U.S. waters.”
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