Call it the price of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Norway's market share of salmon exports to China has plummeted from 92 percent in 2010 to just 29 percent in the first half of this year. Both the Faroe Islands and the UK have overtaken it in sales despite it enjoying a near monopoly for the previous decade.
The cause is obvious, say industry and political experts: the decision of a Norwegian committee in October 2010 to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, a jailed Chinese dissident.
(Read more: What is winning a Nobel Prize worth?)
"It is no secret that declining sales in China are connected to the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a difficult political situation between Norway and China, and not something that can be solved by the industry," Alf-Helge Aarskog, chief executive of Marine Harvest, one of the country's biggest salmon farmers, told a Norwegian newspaper.
Slumping salmon market share is the clearest sign of the commercial freeze felt by Norway since the Nobel Prize award. A proposed bilateral trade agreement fell through after years of negotiations while late last year China allowed visitors from every European country apart from Norway to visit Beijing without a visa.