Predictable call to aid Alaska fishermen

The demand for a bailout of Alaska commercial salmon fishermen who didn’t see the salmon returns they expected this year didn’t take long.

Alaska Rep. Sarah Vance sent a plea to Gov. Mike Dunleavy on Sept. 13, the same day the pink salmon seine season officially ended in Prince William Sound, the hardest hit region of the state. 

“Many of you reached out to me requesting a disaster declaration, underscoring the economic impacts of such a historically low harvest,” she wrote in an Instagram missive to commercial fishermen and others the next day. 

The many and the history are, however, both in question. Gillnet fishermen harvesting sockeye salmon in both the Cook Inlet and the Cooper River/Prince William Sound areas had decent seasons, but the approximately 250 seiners that fish the Sound and hatcheries pumping out the pink salmon there took a beating.

Still, “historically low harvest” depends on what history one looks at. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported Sound fishermen harvested just over 5 million pinks this year. 

Pink salmon catches averaged “3 million fish per year between 1951 and 1979,” the history says.

Not to mention that the just over 5 million pinks caught by commercial fishermen in the Sound this season are not the total pink harvest. The total pink harvest for the Sound, according to the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, comes to more than 8.7 million pinks or close to three times the average historic number.

The additional 3.7 million fish – more than the historic pink harvest – comprise fish taken as “cost recovery” by the hatcheries run by the Valdez Fishery Development Association (VFDA) and the Prince William Sound Aquaculture Corporation (PWSAC).

Big new business

Since the operations of state-funded hatcheries in the Sound were taken over in the mid-1990s by PSWAC, a non-profit business controlled by commercial fishermen,  free-range ocean farming of salmon has been steadily taking over the region’s fishing business.

In a report prepared for the PWSAC in 2018, the McDowell Group, an economic consultancy, said that hatchery, cost-recovery harvests had increased to such an extent that 43 percent of the Sound’s pink salmon harvest value from 2012 to 2017 could be attributed to the corporation’s hatcheries. 

The report did not detail how much of the value went to VFDA, but it would appear that the Sound’s ranchers, as they prefer to be called, are getting at least half the value out of the Sound’s pinks and could be getting significantly more.

This year, however, appears to be an exception. PSWAC in late August reported that it had reached 58.4 percent of its cost-recovery goal for pinks but was suspending further harvests “to ensure sufficient brood is collected to support meeting the egg-take goals.”

There has been no indication the cost-recovery harvests ever resumed, but the corporation did meet its egg-take goal. It is unclear, however, as to whether the PSWAC has the reserves to cover a significant revenue shortage this year or will need to borrow money from the state as has become an annual norm for the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association.

VFDA, meanwhile, has offered no report on hits cost-recovery harvest, but said it reached only “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.”

The hatcheries appear to have taken the big hit in the Sound with Fish and Game all season long reporting that for wild fish the “escapement trends,” the number of fish getting past the nets of commercial fishermen and back to their spawning streams and rivers, “are within the expected ranges for this timeframe.”

The marginal return of pinks this year was not a big surprise either. This has happened in other even-numbered years and is something for which fishermen, processors and hatcheries could be expected to plan.

Only three years ago, Seattle-based fisheries consultant Greg Ruggerone and colleagues James Irvine and Brendan Connors with Fisheries and Oceans Canada told the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission that 2020 saw the biggest crash in North Pacific salmon numbers in almost 100 years.

“We hypothesize that a tipping point was reached in the North Pacific Ocean, leading to the substantial decline of all five species of Pacific salmon in 2020. We infer that the tipping point was caused by the combined effects of unusually frequent marine heatwaves since 2014 and exceptional back-to-back year abundances of pink salmon in 2018/2019,” they said.

“Preliminary commercial catch statistics for all salmon species indicate Pacific salmon harvests, which provide an index of abundance, declined more in 2020 than in any other period on record since 1930.”

From very high to low

The 2020 harvest followed an all-species catch of 206.9 million salmon in 2019, the eighth largest in Alaska history. This year’s crash, which marks the first time in this century the all-species salmon harvest in Alaska has fallen below 100 million fish, followed an even bigger harvest of 230.2 million salmon last year, the fourth highest on record. 

These big swings between even and odd years are largely linked to pink salmon, the smallest and most plentiful of the species.

The difference between pink returns in odd-numbered years and those in even-numbered years, such as this one, began growing in the 1990s as the hatcheries in the Sound went fully operational and for a dozen years now returns have gone as predictably up and down as a yo-yo.

Despite a preseason Sound forecast predicting the return of 26.5 million hatchery fish and the possible return of 6.5 million wild fish, 50 percent above the 10-year average, the total harvest was expected to be about half of the 60.3 million of 2023.

Fishery managers who compiled the forecast also conceded that they were largely shooting in the dark when forecasting pink returns.

“There is a great deal of uncertainty in forecasting pink salmon returns due to their fixed two-year life history and therefore limited information to serve as the basis for predictions (i.e., no siblings returning during prior years),” they wrote. “As a result, pink salmon harvest forecasts are generally based on harvests from previous brood years.

“A notable exception is Southeast Alaska where a joint ADF&G and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) survey and juvenile pink salmon outmigration index is the basis for predicting harvests the following year.”

The Southeast pink return came in very close to the forecast for 19.7 million pinks. One biologist involved with the Southeast study said pinks are hard to predict because of the massive mortality as the young fish head to sea.

Those fish are heavily dependent on plankton production for food. And if that isn’t problem enough, they can also basically be thought of as the spring food for many birds and marine mammals.

As a result of these two things, most young pinks die before or shortly after they hit the ocean waters off the Panhandle. The outmigrant index helps account for the losses on the way to sea and provides the basis for a more accurate estimate of returns.

Fishermen guessing, too

Reduced fishing effort in the Sound this season would indicate some Sound seiners, who catch the vast majority of the Sound pinks, anticipated what was coming this year and decided not to fish, which would have been a wise business decision.

Such decisions are not unusual, either. Data from the state’s Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission indicates that a significant number of the 267 people who hold permits to seine salmon in the Sound regularly make such decisions.

Permit “latency,” as the agency describes permits that are not fished from year to year, has ranged from a high of 62 percent in 2005 when prices paid for pinks fell to eight cents per pound to a low of 10.9 percent in 2019 with prices back up to 34 cents per pound.

Pink prices peaked at an inflation-adjusted 72 cents per pound in 2012 before crashing back to an inflation-adjusted 30 cents per pound. In the years that followed, prices ranged from 35 to 55 cents per pound (non-inflation adjusted) before falling to 23 cents per pound last year.

Prices started out low again this year but were reported to have crept upward because of the shortage of fish. With prices higher and the catch distributed among fewer fishermen, it seems a little early to determine whether the season was truly a disaster for all.

And even if it was, there is the question of whether the government should be regularly bailing out businessmen, in this case commercial fishermen, who make bad business decisions. But there is now a history of bailouts.

Last year and the year before, it was the Alaska Congressional delegation convincing the U.S. Department of Agriculture to purchase millions of dollars worth of salmon because Alaska fishermen had caught and Alaska processors had bought more than the market wanted.

Before that, there were disaster aid packages in the tens of millions of dollars for fishermen in 2020 and 2018, according to the Fish and Game web page that only goes back to 2018. But there was also the 2016 Pink Salmon Disaster Relief Fund of more than $56 million.

Some are now questioning whether all this federal aid serves to encourage fishermen to ignore the need to plan for the predictably bad even-numbered years when the fishing is great in the predictably good odd-numbered years.

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