A Prince William Sound seiners haul 24 cent per pound pink salmon/YouTube

Alaska salmon, the poor folks’ seafood!

Why, oh why, do the political leaders of the 49th state want to portray Alaska salmon as a commodity the market doesn’t want?

First it was the Alaska Congressional delegation pushing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to buy salmon as part of a move that Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the state’s senior senator, in February told Alaskans aimed at “bolster(ing) Alaska’s seafood industry and support our coastal communities” that “will help bring the highest-quality and healthiest seafood products in the world to families in need.”

Murkowski at least had the sense to try to spin the purchase as an aid program for American women, infants and children in need when she made a national pitch two months later.

“It is great news for America’s mothers and their children…that USDA is including low-mercury seafood like Alaska salmon in more WIC food packages,” her official communique said then. “Alaska’s wild salmon is among the healthiest and most nutritious food in the world and I’m grateful for Alaska’s fishermen and the seafood industry who help provide it to consumers. I’ve long worked on this issue because Alaskan seafood should be accessible to America’s children and mothers in our food programs.

Her Republican colleague, Sen. Dan Sullivan, was more blunt in his February description of what was going on.

“Our great fishing industry is a pillar of Alaska’s economy and culture, and a vital part of America’s food supply chain,” he said. “It’s welcome news for our fishermen that the USDA is purchasing $100 million worth of Alaska salmon. We will continue to work on many fronts to advance policies and legislation that provide greater stability and more opportunities for the thousands of Alaskans who make up our world-class, sustainable seafood industry.”

Alaska’s political leaders have been rushing in to “provide greater stability” for that “great fishing industry” because the people in control of the business can’t seem to figure out how to sell all the salmon now being caught.

For decades now, the average annual catch of Alaska salmon has been on the rise, the average price of state salmon has been in decline, and still consumers aren’t buying. Back in 1988, sockeye salmon, the overall most valuable catch in Alaska – were worth an average $6.91 per pound (in 2023 dollars) to the fishermen delivering them to processors, according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game data. 

Last year, the same fish were worth 64 cents per pound, a more than tenfold drop in value, according to state figures. In Bristol Bay, the state’s by far largest sockeye fishery, the average price was so low – 52 cents – a fisherman had to catch and sell two sockeye to earn 83 percent of what he or she was pocketing for each pound of the fish in 1988.

The Alaska Legislature’s latest response to this devaluation of what was once one of the state’s most valuable resources has been to follow the lead of the Alaska Congressional delegation and throw money at the commercial fishing industry.

It decided to give SeaShare – a Washington-state-based, non-profit, food bank that describes itself as a “partner” of the seafood industry  – $10 million so it “can immediately assist in improving the resilience and competitiveness of the Alaska seafood industry by purchasing oversupply from the 2023 harvest, which is currently draining storage resources.”

SeaShare plans to take this seafood and distribute it to “rural areas with the most acute hunger needs.”

How exactly this improves the “resilience and competitiveness of the Alaska seafood industry” is unclear.  As a general rule, competitiveness is improved by competing, which is the thing at which the Alaska seafood industry is failing.

Good intentions?

Feeding the poor is a generally commendable act. No doubt about that. But the Legislature’s “competitiveness” message here is bad. It is might best be described this way:

“We’re going to pay a non-profit organization to take $10 million of seafood off the hands of Alaska salmon processors and feed it to the poor because Americans with the means to buy their own seafood don’t want it.”

Obviously, Alaska lawmakers weren’t paying attention to the question Alaska Commissioner of Fish ans Game Doug Vincent-Lang posed at ComFish, the state’s annual commercial fishing trade, in Kodiak earlier this month.

“Without a market, what’s the use of having fisheries out there?” Vincent-Lang asked fishing industry leaders there, KMXT public radio in Kodiak reported.

It is the pertinent question. If your product isn’t selling, you either need to change your product, change your sales pitch, find a new market or streamline your production until you can get the price of your product down to what consumers are willing to pay.

Creating the impression that Alaska salmon are what the poor folk eat, or what the poor folk are fed by the government, isn’t going to help make Alaska salmon more attractive to upscale customers.

You don’t see the market-dominant salmon farmers of Norway, Chile, Scotland and other nations selling their fish this way.

Take it from the Alaskan Salmon Company, which bills itself as “Your personal fisherman,” and declares “Norwegian salmon is widely recognized for its high quality and premium status in international markets. Norwegian salmon has become a popular food choice around the world, prized for its mild and delicate flavor, firm texture, and nutritional benefits.”

Alaska salmon? It’s the stuff the government sends to food banks. 

How did Alaska go from being the producer of the world’s premium salmon to being a government-funded supplier of cheap protein for food banks? Easy. It was and is governed by politicians who too easily follow the lead of commercial fishermen and Outside-based fish processors.

Thanks to direct state financing of hatcheries and indirect state aid in the forms of grants and state-backed loans to subsidize the commercial fishermen now running those hatcheries, Alaska has managed to shrink the size of its once prized sockeye and coho salmon, become the world leader in the production of undersized, ocean-farmed pink salmon and along the way led the nation to the position of the world’s number one producer of ocean-farmed salmon of all species, according to the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission (NPAFC), a treaty organization.

‘Wild caught’

The Alaska hatchery release of 1.9 billion juvenile salmon in 2022 far surpassed the release of slightly more than 1 billion young salmon in Japan, the nation that pioneered the “ranching” of the fish the Alaska salmon industry today markets as “wild caught,” according to NPAFC data.

Through the 1980s and into the early 2000s, Japan was the world leader in releasing ocean-farmed fish to graze on the free pastures of the North Pacific, but thanks to Alaska, the U.S. managed to take over in the 2010s.

Not that everyone is celebrating this. The Seattle-area-based Wild Fish Conservancy has petitioned the federal government to list Alaska king salmon (Chinook) as threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) due in part to swarms of hatchery fishy over-grazing the ocean range.

And just days ago, the Conservancy joined The Conservation Angler, a Portland-based group, in filing a federal lawsuit aimed at cutting off the funds for Lower Columbia River hatcheries the organizations say are hurting, not helping, the river’s wild Chinook salmon.

“A 2023 study evaluated the impact of the federal government’s total $9 billion investment in hatchery production and restoration spending in the Columbia River over the past 40 years. Despite the massive scale of this expense, the study results showed no evidence of increased abundance of wild salmon or steelhead in the Columbia River Basin,” the group said on its website. 

“‘The failure of Columbia River hatcheries should come as no surprise. The region’s independent scientific experts have determined that massive hatchery releases are likely preventing the recovery of the basin’s salmon and steelhead through competition for limited food and space and genetic impacts to wild fish,’ said Nick Gayeski, Senior Aquatic Ecologist with the Wild Fish Conservancy.”

The Columbia hatcheries were originally pitched as an aid to wild Chinook runs struggling to overcome the impediments of Columbia and Snake River hydroelectric dams on their way to spawning grounds in the Pacific Northwest and Canada.

Alaska salmon never faced the habitat problems that such dams created in Canada and the Lower 48, and the Alaska hatchery program was never directed at solving such problems. It was aimed purely at producing more fish for commercial fishermen.

“The 30-year consecutive mean, high-annual catch is 82 million salmon,” the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s division of Fisheries Rehabilitation, Enhancement and Development declared in 1983. “The long-term plan for salmon in Alaska calls for nearly 143 million fish for harvest annually, of which 51 million are to be produced by enhancement and rehabilitation techniques. Included within this harvest of 51 million are 25 million chum, 8 million sockeye, 1.5 million coho, and 300,000 chinook salmon; the remainder will be made up of pink salmon.”

In the year’s since, the mean annual harvest has grown to more than twice that. It stood at 182 million per year for the decade from 2012 to 2021, but because about a third of the harvest is comprised of hatchery pinks and chums, the least valuable of Alaska salmon, the value of the catch has radically declined.

Chums and pinks are the preferred choice of Alaska’s ocean farmers because they don’t require a year or more of expensive rearing in freshwater before they go to sea. The original plan was that these fish would over-winter in the hatcheries and then go immediately to sea with wild fish in the spring, but over the years, that strategy has changed.

Looks like farming

Most of the fish are now held in the same sort of net pens used by Norwegian farmers and fed for weeks or months before their release to increase their odds of surviving at sea once released.

The consequences of providing hatchery fish this sort of competitive advantage over young wild fish has never been calculated and would appear in violation of the state’s legally mandated “Policy for the management of mixed stock salmon fisheries.”

That policy states, among other things, that the “effects and interactions of introduced or enhanced salmon stocks on wild salmon stocks should be assessed; wild salmon stocks and fisheries on those stocks should be protected from adverse impacts from artificial propagation and enhancement efforts.”

There has never been an assessment of the “effects and interactions of…enhanced salmon stocks on wild salmon.” When the state’s director of commercial fisheries research was asked about this by the Board of Fisheries in 2018, he claimed such an assessment is impossible because the ocean ecosystem is too complicated. 

State scientist Bill Templin conceded there were correlations between increasing numbers of hatchery fish and declines in more valuable Chinook, sockeye and coho salmon, but argued that “correlation is not causation.”

And it is certainly true that no scientists to date have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that increases in Alaska hatchery salmon are driving declines in Alaska wild salmon, but what is well documented is that the promises FRED made in 1983 – before the division was disbanded and state salmon hatcheries turned over to associations controlled by commercial fishermen – have almost never been met.

Only once in the past 40 years has the hatchery goal for coho salmon been met. And the goals for Chinook, sockeye and chum have never been met despite the addition of a significant number of hatchery chums. They appear to have mainly replaced wild chums in the harvest.

Meanwhile, the hatchery goal has been hugely exceeded for pink salmon, the least valuable and least desired of Alaska salmon, and a species that in the view of some scientists is now so plentiful in the North Pacific Ocean that it is by sheer numbers affecting the size and number of other salmon species.

Worst of all, however, is that these ocean-farmed salmon often go into cans and pouches because so many of the fish are too small to produce marketable filets, and canned salmon – pink or red – simply isn’t selling very well

Norway’s salmon farmers knew what to do when they found themselves with an oversupply of salmon that wasn’t selling. They didn’t ask the government to pay them to take it off their hands. They went and found a market for their fish.

They began Project Japan, which was the beginning of salmon sushi in that country. Salmon sushi, rarely eaten before the 1990s because of concerns about parasites common in wild salmon, is now “the most popular topping for many at conveyor-belt sushi restaurants,” according to Nippon.com

This is how capitalism works. Businesses succeed by producing and marketing products they can sell consumers rather than begging for government handouts. Businesses that don’t do that collapse, or should collapse, to be replaced by businesses producing the goods and services consumers want.

If the Alaska Legislature had been truly interested in “improving the resilience and competitiveness” of the Alaska seafood industry, it would have kicked another $10 million to the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) and told it to figure out how to sell Alaska salmon, especially canned Alaska salmon, which is both healthy and cheap.

Alaska “wild-caught,” canned, pink salmon can today be found on a sale at Walmart for $5 per pound, about a dollar per pound more than Walmart’s cheapest hamburger but approximately a dollar per pound less than its cheapest “lean” ground beef.

Boneless chicken breasts and some cuts of pork are cheaper, but in the “healthy eating” category, they don’t compare with Omega-3 loaded salmon.

As the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University has observed, “it is important to eat fish or other seafood 1-2 times a week, particularly fatty (dark meat) fish that is richer in EPA and DHA” given the wide-ranging (health) importance of marine omega-3 fatty acids.

According to the National Institutes of Health, three ounces of pink salmon – canned and drained – has five times the Omega-3s of the same size serving of tuna – canned and drained – almost 24 times the Omega-3s in three ounces of ground beef and more than 31 times the Omega-3s than in three-ounces of chicken.

Alaskans – spoiled on tastier red, coho and Chinook (king) salmon – might turn up their noses at commercially canned pinks, but they can be fairly considered a health food powerhouse.

But they’re not being made to look that way. Alaska’s bountiful pinks, and to some extent the undersize sockeye (red) salmon that have flooded Bristol Bay in the last few years are being made to look like the protein source the government unloads on the poor folk because better-off Americans don’t think it’s worth buying.

And instead of trying to change this perception, or alter the management of Alaska fisheries to produce the salmon people want at a price they can afford, the state has decided to yet again prop up the commercial fishermen and salmon processors who created the mess the Alaska fishing business is in now.