
Part of the Canadian salmon fleet tied up at Bella Coola, B.C. in the 20th-century heyday of the fishery/Wikimedia Commons
As if Canadian commercial fishermen didn’t have it bad enough with precipitously declining salmon runs and Alaska interceptions of Canadian-born fish, now they’ve lost Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification of their sockeye, chum and pink salmon fisheries.
MSC is considered the global go-to for defining which fisheries are “sustainable” and which are not. Sustainability is now considered an important selling point for fish with the world’s oceans plagued by overfishing.
Consumers, especially those in high-value Western markets, have taken notice.
While price was the dominant factor influencing seafood-buying decisions, the survey highlighted some other potential marketing problems for Canadian commercial fishermen, as well as those in Alaska. According to the survey results:
- “90 percent of shoppers are concerned about contaminants like mercury in fish and seafood
- “88 percent are concerned about ocean pollution
- “86 percent are worried about the extinction of wild fish species”
Blue Circle is a Washington, D.C.-based fish retailer that promotes itself as “an employee-owned, sustainable seafood company founded in 2005 by organic industry pioneers. We produce feel-good fish for everyday eating – from fillets to fun things like salmon sausages and burgers always free from fillers and breadcrumbs.
“We’re passionate about continuous improvement in both aquaculture (fish farming) and wild-caught fishing practices. As protein producers, we have a responsibility to the environment. Our farmed salmon and shrimp are net producers of protein, meaning that unlike farmed beef, chicken, and pork, our salmon and shrimp generate more protein than they take out of the environment. By sourcing sustainably farmed and wild-caught fish, we’re helping to save resources for the future.”
The company is of the sort that would turn up its nose at salmon lacking MSC certification, though examinations of the salmon supply chain have indicated it is pretty easy to slip unsustainable salmon into stores. A variety of studies and investigations conducted over the course of the past 10 years have shown seafood widely mislabeled.
Still, the Canadians, which MSC ditched at the end of October, sound worried.
Tough market
“It closes down some markets to us, because large retailers are looking for that blue (MSC) logo,” he said. ” f you can’t provide it, they won’t buy your fish regardless of what you say about it. It’s not insignificant.”
Chauvel also happens to be the chairman of the B.C. Salmon Marketing Council, which along with other B.C. fishing organizations has blamed the Canadian government for their problems.
The latter claim is an overstatement. Salmon are an amazingly resilient and adaptable species. But there is no doubt many Canadian salmon runs are depressed, and Canadian scientists have documented Chinook salmon, the biggest of the species, in trouble from Oregon north all the way to the Alaska Peninsula.
No one knows why, but a warming ocean and/or competition from the exploding number of pink salmon therein have been cited as likely suspects.
Canada’s answer to its salmon fishery problem – harvests are now a fifth or less the 65 million metric tonne average from the 1950s to the start of the new millennium – appears to be to copy the Alaska ocean-farming plan which transformed Prince William Sound from a minor fishery wqithout hatcheries to the state’s major producer of pink salmon with hatcheries.
Before hatcheries, pink salmon catches in the Sound averaged 3 million fish per year for the decades from 1951 to 1979. As hatcheries came online in 1974 and began to grow in size, the average pink harvest in the Sound rose steadily. According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game data, the 10-year average harvest from 2010 to 2019 now stands at just over 50 million pinks per year, a better than 16-fold increase.
Whether the program will work as well in Canada as in Alaska is a big unknown. Past experiences with enhancement projects in Canada have not met with the envisioned success.
And the science powered some big dreams. Work by the late Bill Ricker, a pioneer in managing salmon for optimum escapement (ie. spawning numbers), suggested Canadian streams and rivers should be capable of annually producing 100,000 tonnes of salmon per year or more.
“However, despite attempts in the 1950s and 1960s to achieve this optimal escapement, catches could not be built up to levels thought to exist in the late 1800s,” Noakes and Beamish reported. “This inability to increase catches led to the establishment of an enhancement program, officially funded in 1977.
“The original goal of the Salmon Enhancement Program was to more than double salmon production to approximately 150,000 tonnes annually based in part on rebuilding targets proposed by Ricker. Salmon catches did increase and reached the highest levels of the fishery in 1985 and 1986 with catches of 107,500 t and 104,000 tonnes, respectively.
“Despite the apparent rebuilding and the new enhancement program, however, catches declined steadily until 13 years later they were the lowest in the history of the fishery in 1999.”
All downhill
Harvests have remained low ever since. Catches that averaged nearly 31 million salmon per year in the 1980s averaged under 7.6 million per year in the 2010s, according to harvest data compiled by the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission (NPAFC).
And the last three years have been a disaster.
The catch this year, according to the NPAFC, was 668,090. The three-year, all-species average is under 1.4 million. That is less than the 1.7 million, all-species harvest in Cook Inlet, one of the state’s smaller salmon fisheries, this year.
The Cook Inlet fishery, like most Canadian fisheries, is heavily dependent on the return of sockeye salmon, and like the Canadian fisheries, might be paying a price for Alaska’s bounty of pink salmon or “humpies” as they are commonly called.
They did not attempt to quantify the effects of the boom in wild pinks likely linked to warming Gulf waters and definitely linked to years of efforts on the part of the state to manage the fish for maximum yields. The Alaska harvests of pinks in recent years have regularly exceeded the historic, all-species harvests in the state.
Though this year’s harvest of more than 69 million pinks, nearly half of them in the Sound, is considered low for recent times, it exceeded the state’s all species catch in all the years from 1970 through 1977 and topped the decadal average for the ’70s by more than 20 million fish.
The Canadians should be so lucky.
No mention of pen raised salmon and their effect on wild Salmon in British Columbia? How long before BC bans pen raised Salmon like California, Oregon, and Washington? https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/washington-oregon-alaska-ban-open-net-fish-farms-bc-next
Canada said it was going to do that and has since backed away. The effects of pen-raised salmon on wild salmon in B.C. appear small, if they exist at all. There are bigger questions around non-penned farmed salmon, and Canada has suggested upping hatchery capacity to do more of free-range farming because of Alaska’s success with the same.
The science appears to argue against that idea, but the “listen to the scientists” screech of the pandemic seems to have gone away.
That said, I would expect Canadian net-pen farming to be slowly washed away by the next technological wave.
When will the State of Alaska see the folly of supporting commfish and hatchery exploiting the environment?
thank you for the information