“No disrespect to any other player (in the fishing business),” McKinley CEO Rob Gillam told the magazine at the time, “but our business model is to come in and participate in the resource and participate in developing the return and keep some of the money and that profit here in the state.

“Truth is, it’s a great business. It’s a great business because we have something that the world wants: we have wild Alaskan salmon.”

Four years later, Wells Fargo Bank went to court to push the new Peter Pan into receivership in an effort to recover what it could of $60 million in loans on which the company had stopped making payments, Fishermen’s News reported. 

The company – once one of the biggest players in the Alaska salmon business – promptly went under, lending some credence to a Maruha Nichiro observation at the time of the sale to McKinley:

“….In recent years, Peter Pan Seafood’s Alaskan salmon business has continued to experience operating losses due to factors such as soaring raw fish prices due to the intensified competition, high costs due to poor catch of fish, and fall in production.”

Competition

Nearly all of that competition has come from farmers in Norway, Chile and elsewhere who have turned salmon into the new and healthier chicken of this millennium.

The salmon boom has led to serious implications for Alaska due to the heavy competition among net-pen and recirculating aquaculture (RAS) salmon farms putting constant downward pressure on global salmon prices.

The wide availability of farmed fish at reasonable prices has had a drastic effect on what consumers are today willing to pay for salmon of any sort.

A 1988 Bristol Bay sockeye good for more than $7.50 per pound to Alaska fishermen in 2024 dollars was when sold at the dock in 2024 worth a preliminary price of 89 cents per pound, according to the state. That price has likely crept over $1 per pound with bonuses paid for how fishermen handled the catch.

But with Bay sockeye the smallest on record in 2024 at four and a half pounds per fish on average, the fishermen in the state’s richest fishery are now getting paid significantly less for each fish than a pound of sockeye was worth back in the 20th Century.

Meanwhile, the salmon Alaska produces in by far the greatest numbers – smallish pink salmon, average weight 3.1 pounds last year – are less and less in demand. Most of these fish still go into cans or pouches, the new millennium version of a can, because they are too small to sell as filets or steaks, the favored form of salmon.

And canned seafood is not selling all that well in the U.S.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports American consumption of canned seafood peaked at 5.5 pounds per person in 1999 and was by 2021 down to 3.7 pounds in a market long dominated by the sale of canned tuna.

Globally, Alaska salmon retain a dominant presence in the canned salmon market given most of the Western world boycotting salmon from Russia, Alaska’s chief competitor. But canned salmon is not where the money is concentrated.

The big money in the salmon business is in the sale of steaks and filets, and the farmers raising Atlantic, coho and Chinook salmon in pens or “bluehouses,” rather than ranching their stock at sea as Alaska hatcheries do, now produce most of that product.

To the west of the Falklands in the same Antarctic waters, farmed salmon have become one of Chile’s chief exports, trailing only copper and pitted fruits shipped out of the South American country, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity. 

Chile now produces about 25 percent of the global salmon supply. Most of that, approximately 787,000 metric tonnes, is Atlantic salmon, but about 205,000 tonnes is coho salmon which competes directly with Alaska coho.

Alaska fishermen landed 4,737 tonnes of coho in 2024, according to Fish and Game numbers, or less than one-fortieth of Chilean production, and about one-twentieth of the volume of Chilean salmon that ends up on U.S. dinner plates.

“Approximately 50 percent by weight of salmon imported into the U.S. comes from Chile,” according to the Chilean Salmon Marketing Council. Still, on a global scale, Chile is a minor supplier compared to Norway – the smallish, Scandinavian country that now produces more than half of the world’s salmon.

Role reversal

Norway has become what Alaska was before Norwegian experiments with raising salmon domestically exploded into hugely successful businesses there and elsewhere.

That wild and ocean-farmed salmon sold as “wild caught” have managed to hang onto nearly 25 percent of the market for salmon in the 2000s is thanks only to a North Pacific boom in pinks fueled in part by Alaskan and Russian hatcheries, and in part by warmer Pacific waters in which the smallest and least valuable of salmon are reported to enjoy a competitive advantage.

The record Alaska salmon harvest of 272 million fish that came in 2013 was comprised of about 80 percent pinks, the fish Alaskans often refer to simply as humpies due to the humpbacked shape of spawning males.

That harvest also set a record for salmon by weight, which came in just shy of 500,000 tonnes or about half the volume of salmon produced in Chile last year. Sadly for the Alaska economy, the high volume of humpies in the annual harvests – especially in odd-numbered years – are destined to go into cans or pouches where they compete with sardines and mackerel in the market dominated by tuna.

“…Tuna is highly affordable, thus making it an ideal choice for consumers. Moreover, with respect to canned forms, tuna can be stored for a prolonged period and can be easily transported, which further contributes to the product’s growth,” Fortune Business Insights reported last year.

“Sardines have emerged as one of the fastest-growing species of the global canned seafood market share and are expected to soar at a crucial pace in the future years. Canned sardines are recognized as a nutritional powerhouse as they are packed with tons of nutrients, such as minerals, vitamins, proteins, and omega fatty acids.”

Alaska does not produce sardines and unfortunately for the Alaska canneries that produce pinks, the Norwegians have now moved into the canned salmon business to sell some of the trimmings of their high-value filets of Atlantic salmon or parts of the fish that might not be otherwise marketable due to injuries.

King Oscar, a well-known sardine brand, last year launched “Atlantic Salmon in Olive Oil with Lemon, featuring what it pitched as “gourmet quality, skinless and boneless Atlantic salmon, hand-packed in certified 100 percent olive oil with bright, fresh lemon flavor. Farm-raised in Norway. Extraordinary, mild flavor and moist texture. A delicious, low-carb, convenient, ready-to-eat superfood” high in omega-3s, low in calories, and if that wasn’t enough, “on-GMO and gluten-free, kosher-certified…(and in) recyclable aluminum cans.”

In the U.S., King Oscar just makes for more competition in a shrinking market for canned seafood.

Capitalism

This is the real and highly competitive world of the commercial salmon business today in which Alaska’s pitch of “wild caught,” so as to disguise the fact the fish might have been ocean farmed, is becoming less and less valuable, and especially so in markets for canned and pouched seafood aimed primarily at shoppers on a budget.

It was not by accident that the Alaska salmon harvest last year resulted in a bargain-basement low value of approximately $304 million with the state reporting that pink salmon, which comprised 40 percent of the harvest “accounted for approximately 9 percent of the value.”

The 2024 season ended with some processors going out of business and the entire processing business in shambles amid pleas for yet more state aid to save an industry that now primarily employs seasonal, foreign workers because it needs cheap labor simply to survive.

All of this at a time when the global market for farmed salmon is booming.

“The Salmon Fish Market was valued at $19.1 billion in 2024, and is projected to reach $44.4 billion by 2034,” Research and Markets reported a week ago. The report did note that “sustainability is also becoming a core focus,” but added that this is only “pushing advancements in aquaculture. Technologies such as recirculating aquaculture systems and sustainable feeds are making production more efficient while reducing environmental impact.”

On the other hand, on the wild-caught front, Research and Markets reported that “challenges such as overfishing, habitat destruction, climate change, and pollution are putting pressure on wild populations, affecting biodiversity and species dependent on salmon for survival.”

None of that talk of pressure on wild populations or damage to biodiversity is good for the Alaska commercial salmon business no matter how well managed the state’s salmon.

And all of the trendlines here are ominous for the Alaska segment of what is now a very global business.

These days, the globe’s “largest salmonid species is farmed Atlantic salmon with a production of 2.7 million mt (metric tons) in 2020,” the Aquacluture paper noted. “Atlantic salmon made up 71.4 percent of total salmon production in 2020, up from 47.3 percent in 2000. The second largest category is (all-species) wild salmon, which made up 16.6 percent of total production in 2020, down from 37.9 percent in 2000.

“In 1980, the production was dominated by wild salmon, and farmed trout production was as large as farmed salmon production. The share of Atlantic salmon has increased over time for several reasons where the most important appears to be that it is less costly to have it available for the market at all times of the year and therefore can be marketed as fresh, never-frozen year-round, in contrast to the other species that are mostly marketed as frozen (and) shows the importance of adjusting to demand in the U.S. market.”

The fresh market is largely unavailable to Alaska salmon processors, given the short summer fishing season and the large volume of fish caught over the space of a few months. There is no choice but to freeze, can or pouch most of these fish.

As a result, the Research and Markets Report said, “farmed Atlantic salmon continues to gain traction due to its year-round availability and lower cost compared to wild-caught options.”

The frozen market is growing, but unfortunately for the Alaska fishing business, the farmers, which once largely left the frozen fish segment to wild-salmon processors, are now moving into the freezers as well. The farmers posted back-to-back record years for frozen salmon from 2019 through 2022, but frozen farm exports ot the U.S. fell slightly in 2023, according to Seafood News, probably due to falling prices as wild-caught processors slashed prices to try to move a backlog of fish in freezers.

It has become increasingly obvious that the state of Alaska could throw a lot of money at trying to promote greater consumption of commercially caught Alaska salmon and make little if any headway in restoring the value of the Alaska commercial salmon fishery.

It well past time for the state to accept this reality and consider other ways to promote what was once one of the state’s most valuable resources in order to increase its value.

Alaskans might take offense at coolers full of salmon being hauled through the Anchorage airport by visiting anglers from the Lower 48, Europe and Asia, but the money those anglers spend per fish now dwarfs the value of the same fish put on a barge and hauled south to be sold by the tonnes, or shipped to Asia to be processed into filets and steaks later shipped back to the U.S. for sale.

When it comes to salmon, the state has long recongized the Alaska Constitutional requirement to manage for “conservation of all natural resources belonging to the state,” but it has ignored the constitutal requirement that the “utilization” and “development” of those same resources should be done in the name of “the maximum benefit of (the state’s) people.”

The Alaska Board of Fisheries, the entity that oversees how the state’s salmon are harvested, has steadfastly avoided allocating salmon between various fisheries on the basis of the best economic returns per pound. This is to be expected by an entity that was long dominated by commercial fishing interests.

Past Boards have only reluctantly allocated salmon from commercial fisheries to more valuable tourism-related fisheries when under heavy pressure from advocates for sportfishing and local food security, be it in the form of subsistence or personal-use dipnetting or subsistence.

The Board should have long ago begun advocating for adding an economist or several to the state Fish and Game department to offer advice on allocating salmon to provide the best economic return for the state and local economies.

But few in power in state government have shown much interest in how to transition the fishing business from low-value commercial operations to higher-value tourist operations going forward.

Instead the discussions in the state capital, and among the Alaska Congressinal delegation, have focused on more bailouts for an a failing industry destined to need ever more bailouts.