Natural Resources Consultants
Countdown to a disaster request begins
The commercial season for pink salmon is done in Prince William Sound with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reporting a harvest of barely over 5 million fish or less than a quarter of the nearly 20.5 million catch forecast.
If the past is precedent, a request for disaster aid will be forthcoming shortly as happened after the weak pink returns of 2016 and again in 2020. Almost everyone in the commercial fishing business and knowledgable observers see this as inevitable in a year in which Alaska is about to set a new millennium record for a bad salmon-harvest.
As of today, the total, statewide, all-species catch was reported as 95.3 million, and even in a good year, there are less than 1.5 million fish caught from this date on. This is decidedly not a good year.
This makes the all-species catch certain to come in shy of 100 million, something that hasn’t happened since 1987
For most of Alaska’s history from 1880 to about 1980, harvests near or above 100 million were admittedly the hallmark of a decent season. But better, science-based management and the introduction of free-range salmon farming, or what Alaska hatchery operators prefer to call “ranching,” began to change this as the new millennium approached.
The record harvest for the 1980s topped 147 million and in the 1990s, it for the first time went over 200 million, a number once thought unfathomable. Meanwhile, decadal average harvests just kept going up, up, up.
The last time Alaska witnessed a catch under 100 million was in 1987, which was somewhat unique in that nearly all of the smallish catches since then have come in even-numbered years like the disaster years of 2020 with a harvest of 116.8 million and 2016 with a harvest of 111.2 million.
A harvest of 113.8 million in 2018 also brought a disaster declaration, but federal aid was limited to a variety of sockeye, Chinook and chum fisheries despite a pink salmon harvest a third of what it was in 2017.
The smallest and most plentiful of the salmon species, odd-year pinks and even-year pinks are genetically distinct fish, which have long returned to Alaska in smaller numbers in even-numbered years than in odd-numbered years (see the red line in the graph above).
But ever since the state’s ocean-farming, salmon hatcheries operated by commercial fishing interests reached peak production early in the new millennium, the highs of the odd-numbered years have become higher and the lows consistently lower by comparison.
The 2016 Sound harvest of slightly over 23 million pinks, a harvest low enough to trigger federal disaster aid, was preceded by a 2015 harvest that was “the largest on record at 98.3 million fish, exceeding the 2013 harvest of 92.6 million,” according to the Alaska Fish and Game, which that in 2015 declared the Sound winner of “this year’s title for the most valuable salmon fishing area…with an all-species harvest value of $118 million” of which pink salmon made up almost two-thirds at a value of $72 million.
The catch of 23 million the next year was, however, a record low for the decade. The 2020 Sound harvest of fell even lower to just shy of 22.3 million pinks in the wake of a 2019 harvest of more than twice as many humpies, as Alaskans call these fish.
Bust and boom
This boom and bust cycle years ago became the norm, but never of the magnitude of this year. The pink harvest in the Sound last year topped 58 million – nearly 12 times the size of this year’s harvest – and was worth $34.2 million, or about $160,500 per boat, to the 213 seiners who caught nearly all of those humpies.
Those same seiners have witnessed a very, very bad season this year, but many saw this coming and decided to cut their losses by simply not fishing, which meant that what harvest there was ended up spread among fewer boats.
Now there is a serious question to be asked as to whether the federal government should again bail out businessmen who were instrumental in setting up a system that predictably yo-yoes like this.
Shouldn’t the people involved in this sort of business be expected to save during the boom year to be ready for the bust year set to come next?
Though the 2024 catch seems absurdly low compared to recent years, it exceeds the reported average of three million pinks per year between 1951 and 1979 when state-funded hatcheries, later be turned over to commercial fishermen, began producing significant numbers of ocean-farmed fish.
These ocean-farming operations have done well for themselves since then. The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute’s (ASMI) 2022 report on “The Economic Value of Alaska’s Seafood Industry” reported that the people involved in farming salmon, along with those involved in managing the fish, were on average earning about twice as much as the harvesters of the state’s “wild-caught” salmon.
The trickle-down, however, has not been that great.
As for the people processing both wild and wild-caught Alaska salmon, the revenue picture is starkly different story. They were collecting near-poverty-level wages of $22,811 per person but given that most processing plant employees live outside of Alaska or in foreign countries and come north in the summer only to work, the pay might be better than it appears.
Many of the processing workers are on H-2B visas for “temporary, non-agricultural workers,” and The Cato Institute has reported that nearly 20 percent of the nonresident three-quarters of the workforce comes from the so-called Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras where the cost of living is very low.
According to ExpatExchange.com, “the average cost of living for an expat is around $1,000 per month,” and “in Nejapa and the surrounding cities, 24k will buy you a two-bedroom, single-story house.” Nejapa is a suburb of San Salvador, the country’s capital and largest city.
Still, they don’t make anything if there are no jobs, and jobs were not as readily available in the Sound this year because of the low pink return, and now even the hatcheries may find themselves struggling.
It is still struggling to meet that goal, which the Valdez Fisheries Development Association (VFDA), the other big hatchery operator in the Sound, failed to meet. It reported that the VFDA egg take ended on August 30th with “approximately 71 percent of its 270 million permitted green egg take goal. Less than estimated broodstock numbers and lower female percentages contributed to this year’s shortfall.”
Meanwhile, the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association (CIAA) to the north of the Sound had another bad year even though it claimed for cost-recovery nearly all of the salmon returning to its operations.
Still, the loans are required to be repaid at some future date, and there is no indication that CIAA will ever be able to do that. Over the course of the past five years, it has annually fallen short of its $4.4 million cost recovery goal by 31 to 60 percent. This year’s shortfall looks to come closer to the 60 than the 31.
Better-off hatcheries
PSWAC and VFDA look in better shape to weather a short-lived financial downturn, but if ultra-low, even-year returns such as were seen this year become the norm, their business model will have to be modified to increase cost-recovery in the boom years.
And though Alaska’s hatchery program has enjoyed decades of success, helping to boost Alaska commercial salmon harvests from an annual average of 49 million salmon per year in the 1970s to more than 180 million per year for the last decade, there is no guarantee the ocean will continue to provide.
Prior to the addition of hatchery fish, the best decade in Alaska history was the 1930s when the annual average salmon harvest reached 91 million. Since then, fisheries biologists agree that North Pacific warming has helped increase salmon abundance, especially in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, but nobody really knows what the long-term carrying capacity for salmon production.
And not all hatcheries have proven effective over the long term.
As did the state of Alaska, they built a bunch of hatcheries designed to successfully farm the sea and “released millions of salmon into the ocean to be caught by sport and commercial fishermen and began counting the money to be made when the tasty coho and Chinook returned and were served to seafood-loving Americans” as Towslee put it.
But their hatcheries turned out to be more like CIAA than PWSAC.
“Now, after 12 years and investments of millions of dollars, none of Oregon’s 11 private salmon-breeding farms have made a profit,” Towslee reported. “Fishermen bad mouth the quality of the fish and the state legislature, which once welcomed the huge corporate investments, has turned lukewarm on the idea.”
The hatchery operators blamed low-ocean productivity and predators, a villain now being mentioned in the Sound, for weak returns.
“Coastal birds, such as the Common Murre, which traditionally eat squid and anchovy, now dine almost exclusively on aquaculture fish,” Towslee wrote. “They wait outside the coastal release pens together with seals, sea lions and, in some cases, killer whales to gobble up the confused fish as they try to find their way to the ocean.”
And, of course, there was the problem that has become endemic in the Sound:
“Those salmon that survived and followed their instincts back to where they were released didn’t always show the loyalty they should. Some either swam into the wrong hatchery or ignored them all together and continued upstream.”
Nobody knows how many of the hatchery salmon that returned to the Sound this year decided to skip the hatcheries and go feral in Sound streams and rivers, but state officials are reporting spawner goals for most watersheds have been met.
What exactly the mix of wild pinks, hybrids and feral pinks would be interesting to know in that on the surface, it looks as if the wild salmon return to the Sound was pretty good while the hatchery return was pretty bad, which is something hard to easily explain as is a lot of the rest of what went on with the state’s salmon this year.
Sound pinks weren’t the only missing fish.
The Kenai has now gone five years without meeting the Chinook goal.
Returns of sockeye salmon to the Kenai, Copper and Kasilof rivers were healthy, but coho returns to the Susitna River system which drains Southcentral Alaska were a disaster. The Deshka River, usually one of the biggest coho producer in the drainage, saw a return of only 642 of the fish.
The minimum spawning goal is 10,200.
Coho runs elsewhere were also weak but appeared to get better as one moved south into the state’s Panhandle and continued on down the coast into Canada and the Pacific Northwest. Oregon was reporting unusually good numbers of the fish, something which is usually linked to cooler waters in the Pacific.
Bristol Bay, the world’s largest sockeye fishery, witnessed a healthy return, but the fish were unusually small with an average weight of but 4.2 pounds – smaller than the Alaska pink salmon of 1977 that averaged 4.53 pounds.
And while the low numbers of Chinook returning to the northern part of the state were generally of the smallish 10- to 20-pound size that has become something of a norm, the Little Port Walter Hatchery in Southeast Alaska was reporting a return of some of the largest Chinook on record there, and Canadian Chinook looked to be bigger than in recent years.
What exactly happened in the ocean is now the subject of considerable discussion among scientists, but that’s a whole other story.
Correction: This is an edited version of the original story which misidentified Mark Stopha.
Time to declare another disaster and distribute the government checks. Thank you Sen. Murkowski.
The image of the independent Alaskan fisherman braving the elements has become an image of the welfare fisherman asking for a handout every other year.
hi Craig love your investigations of the Alaska Salmon industry . of course I have to get by your biases about ocean ranching.
If you came down to BC for a while and seen what Salmon farming was doing, might have quite different opinions.
We would be happy to have 30 to 40,000 people working in our industry Which is probably only a couple thousand now.
We would be happy to sell fish that is still high in omega-3 instead of fish that has been fed mixture of farm products such as corn.
It would be nice if we ever see another commercial opening on the Fraser river which in its heyday produced over 100 million fish.
The industry is not on welfare here it’s beyond that fact,it hardly exist.
Keep cranking the numbers and believing in myths such as salmon farming.
Cheers
Eric Wickham retired Salmon Fisherman
Eric: I don’t have any biases about free-range ocean farming, but I admit to having one about wild salmon. When the ranchers fatten up young salmon in their net pens – net pens just like those of the net-pen farmers you seem to think are a problem – so they can better survive at sea, who do you think their fish are competing with for survival?
And, I’d expect your net-pen operations in Canada might be cleaner than those here in Alaska where your ranchers are fighting state requirements they clean up the seabed beneath their pens.
Doubtful anything is done cleaner in Canada…look at their oil sands bitumen which is one of the most toxic ways to extract oil…then there is the history of clear-cutting salmon habit that contributes to loss of spawning habit…then there is the Canadian mining history that dumped a lot of toxins into the headwaters of their salmon streams. Basically, the London bankers and way of business in Canada got them to where they are today…and to think Dunleavy wanted to let a Canadian mining company develop Pebble Mine at the headwaters of Bristol Bay…ludicrous!