Bad at the end of the last century and even worse now/G. Knapp graphic
Tough times continue for Alaska fishing industry
As the commercial salmon fishing in Alaska heads into the heart of its summer season, the 49th state would appear to be reliving the end of the 20th century, which came to a finish with pretty much nothing but bad news for a business once a mainstay of the Alaska economy.
It was bad then. It looks to be even worse now.
Whether to start here with reports of Norwegian salmon dumping in the U.S. market, a Russian Far East salmon season that began with “robust catch forecasts” now off to a “rocket start” that suggests even higher than expected harvests, or the slumping demand for seafood in the U.S. markets is hard to determine.
But it might be the latter, given its significant influence on what Alaska fishermen are paid for the fish they catch.
This comes despite a federal government push to get Americans to eat more seafood because of its nutritional benefits. New Dietary Guidelines put out by the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services, and Agriculture in 2020 recommended eating 8 to 10 ounces of seafood per week.
Americans were then eating less than half that on average, and nothing has changed since, other than that they are now, on a per capita basis, buying even less seafood, which would indicate they are eating even less.
“For most shoppers, even frequent seafood consumers, seafood is considered a luxury or indulgence,” Steve Markenson, vice president of Research & Insights for the Food Industry Institute, told Supermarket Perimeter.
This has been good for a handful of Alaska salmon fisheries able to tap into the luxury market. At this moment, Copper River king salmon is selling, if you can get it, for $119.99 per pound at the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle.
Cordova fishermen were reported to be getting up to $20 per pound for these fish at the dock, but the catch was very low because of a weak return to the Southcentral Alaska river, not to mention that many of the Chinook being caught probably weren’t actual “Copper River kings” despite being sold as such.
To try to minimize the catch of Copper kings and still retain a sizeable catch of a much, much bigger run of sockeye salmon, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game pushed commercial fishermen far away from the mouth of the Copper River.
When this has been done in the past, the harvest of true Copper kings has fallen significantly lower while the harvest of kings originating from streams in Southeast Alaska, Canada and the Pacific Northwest has risen dramatically.
A state study of the “Genetic Stock Composition of the Commercial Harvest of Chinook Salmon in Copper River District” from 2018 to 2021 reported that 43 percent of the “Copper River kings” caught in 2021 were, in fact, not “Copper River kings.”
“Of the 43.1 percent of harvests sampled attributable to nonlocal stocks, the majority
originated from the British Columbia reporting group (20.7 percent), followed by (the) West Coast U.S. (8.0 percent), Coastal Southeast Alaska (6.0 percent), and all other reporting groups (less than 5.0 percent each),” the study said.
“The proportion of British Columbia (Canada) fish was unusually high in all three (fishing) periods and increased over the season (range: 18.9 to 23.3 percent).”
Thank you, Canada
Luckily for Alaskans, the Canadians, who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on hatcheries to try to rebuild their failing Chinook stocks, appear not to have noticed and remain focused on interceptions of Canadian Chinook in the Southeast Alaska troll fishery.
Interestingly, too, is the fact that the retail value of a Canadian Chinook caught in that troll fishery is less than half of that of the same fish caught in the Copper River gillnet fishery. The Pike Place Fish Market is, at the moment, selling generic, “wild-caught” Chinook for $54.99 per pound.
The wild-caught label used to describe those fish and others is a ploy to mask the fact that a significant number of the king salmon caught in the Southeast troll fishery, along with some of the kings caught in the Copper River gillnet fishery, are ocean-farmed salmon spawned and reared at hatcheries in Canada and the Lower 48 at significant costs.
Costs are even higher in Alaska, which is why the state, a world leader in the production of ocean-farmed salmon, has never come close to reaching the hatchery goal of 300,000 Chinook salmon per year promised Alaska voters when they approved a massive state hatchery scheme that started in the 1970s.
The state fairly quickly found that hatchery system too costly to operate and turned most of the hatcheries over to non-profit corporations controlled by commercial fishermen who turned their focus to cheap-to-produce, low-value pink and chum salmon. Pinks and chums, but primarily pinks, are forecast to make up about two-thirds of the commercial harvest of 214.6 million salmon that Alaska is forecasting this year.
Since 2013, all odd-year harvests have topped 200 million. And all those harvests were driven by huge catches of pink salmon worth an average 21 cents per pound last year, according to Fish and Game, making the average-size pink worth 66 cents to an Alaska commercial fisherman in 2024.
At 39 cents per pound, chums were worth significantly more than pinks, but still cheap salmon compared to sockeyes at $1.05 per pound and even more valuable Chinooks and cohoes. Sockeyes prices were also driven down last by the small size of the fish – average weight 4.1 pounds – that pushed them out of the category of “luxury or indulgence” seafood.
Those salmon show up in the market as the big, fat filets or think salmon steaks most in demand by consumers when they think of seafood, if they think of salmon at all.
“When shoppers were presented with the prospect that prices for all the major proteins are the same,” Supermarket Perimeter reported, “they were most likely to select seafood, followed closely by beef and then chicken. (But) crabs, lobsters, oysters and mussels, specifically, are preferred over fish or shrimp.”
In the market as it actually exists today, where products compete with each other on price, the magazine reported that when “comparing seafood purchases to meat and poultry, only about one-third of shoppers report eating seafood the recommended two times a week (frequently) and frequent seafood eaters continue to be 32 percent. Conversely, the proportion of frequent poultry eaters is 70 percent and frequent meat/pork eaters is 67 percent.”
And the vast majority of those frequent seafood eaters are not eating pink salmon, which largely go into cans for sale as human or pet food, pouches for human consumption, or is ground into fishmeal for use in pet food, fertilizer or food for other farm animals or aquaculture.
The simple reason for this is that pinks, or humpies as Alaskans call these salmon, are generally too small to make quality filets to compete in the luxury/indulgence market now dominated by farmed salmon filets.
What the customer wants – skinless, boneless, antibiotic-free salmon/Costco
State mismanagement
Though Alaska fishery managers have done an admirable job of managing for salmon abundance since the 1980s, they have done a terrible job of managing salmon for economic value.
That looks great on paper. But there’s a catch.
State records show that the average catch of 157.5 million salmon in the 1990s weighed 789.3 million pounds or only a million pounds less than the 790.2 million pound average for the 20 percent larger average salmon harvests of the last ten years.
There are two reasons for this: 1.) Alaska odd-year salmon harvests are now heavily dominated by pink salmon; and 2.) king, coho and sockeye salmon have shrunk in size likely due to the competition for food at sea with the ever-increasing abundance of pink salmon – both wild and hatchery fish – at sea.
The state long ago lost control of the hatchery system. The Alaska Board of Fisheries, the entity overseeing salmon harvests in the 49th state, years ago bowed to the vested financial interests of the hatcheries.
This is understandable. Big money and jobs are in play. Alaska’s hatcheries, unlike a most of those in Canada and the Lower 48, are not about trying to rebuild failing salmon runs or provide a relatively small number of fish to be caught by sports.
The privately run hatcheries in Alaska are businesses, plain and simple. They might be called “non-profit” businesses, but the commercial fishermen who intercept and sell fish bound for those hatcheries are profiting from them as are the people employed in the hatcheries.
Were there no hatcheries, the hatchery workers would be out of jobs, and the fishermen who control the associations that run the hatcheries would be out somewhere around a third of their income. And particularly in Prince William Sound, the heart of the Alaska ocean farming business, the economic consequences of these sorts of job and income losses would be devastating.
But the hatcheries are only part of the issue.
Despite all the indications that a warmer North Pacific Ocean is being overrun with pink salmon to the detriment of other species, Alaska continues to manage pinks for maximum sustained yield (MSY).
Why? Because MSY is the holy grail of fisheries biologists almost everywhere, even if it translates into lower economic yields.
Alaska commercial fishermen would appear to have lost tens of millions of dollars per year due to this kind of mismanagement. Salmon values in Alaska fluctuate wildly from year to year, but the average value of harvests through the 1990s was approximately $420 million, according to data collected by economist Gunnar Knapp.
Corrected for inflation to 2018, this translates into a value of $760 million. The year 2018 marks the midpoint for the harvest of the last 10 years; the catch that year was worth only $598.2 million, according to state data.
The year 1995, however, over-inflates a 1990s salmon value that averaged about $420 million per year, and 2018, being an even-numbered year with a low pink return, understates the average annual value for the last 10 years.
So to better get an apples-to-apples comparison of value for the average catch of the 1990s and that of the past 10 years, you need to compare the midpoint averages of these two, 10-year periods and then correct them for inflation to the present.
When you do that, the average, annual value of the catch in the 1990s works out to $887 million per year in May 2025 dollars corrected from the decade’s midpoint. And the average catch for the most recent 10 years works out to approximately $684 million per year corrected for inflation to the 10-year midpoint.
Simply put, what all of this boils down to is the fact that Alaska commercial salmon fishermen are catching more fish than ever, but making – on average – about $200 million less per year (in 2025 dollars) than they did in the 1990s.
Catching more fish means they are also working harder to make this money, spending more money on fuel for their boats and other essential whle fishing and, in some cases, spending even more money on fish chilling systems to try to increase the value of the fish they deliver to processors.
Much of this makes little economic sense, but this is Alaska, where it has been long observed that “we don’t care how they do it Outside” – Outside being the world beyond the island that is Alaska. (And no, Alaska isn’t an island somewhere near Mexico no matter what some maps might lead people to believe. Alaska is a figurative island unassociated with the rest of the U.S.)
Little fish
Maybe if Alaska could shrink its salmon just a bit more it could put them in cans and sell them like sardines to get in on that “tinned fish” business, but at the moment the best money is still in Chinook, coho, sockeye, and to a lesser extent chum, salmon that can be fileted and sold as competition for farmed salmon.
And it is here that the reported Norwegian “dumping” of such filets creates a problem, not because those filets, which are usually sold fresh, compete directly with Alaska filets of sockeye and coho, which are usually sold frozen. But because of the influence of cheaper Norwegian farmed salmon on the market.
Undercurrent News, a fishing industry website, at the end of May reported that some salmon farmers in Chile, the world’s second-largest salmon producer after Norway, were reported to be freezing salmon for later sale to deal with the downward trend in fresh salmon prices. And those salmon do compete directly in the market with frozen Alaska sockeye and coho salmon.
Wild-caught salmon once carried a price premium, but that has faded as farmed salmon have become more and more common. Some cooking sites now, in fact, push farmed salmon.
“That means you’re getting salmon at the lower end of the cost spectrum at Costco, but since the fillets lack bones, skin, or extraneous fat, you’re getting more for your money as well since those parts add extra weight that would end up costing you more. Likewise, you’ll spend less time preparing your meal.”
No right-minded Alaskan skins salmon or removes “extraneous fat,” which only adds flavor to the fish, but the above-described filet appears to be what most American want of their salmon if they want salmon.
The average American consumer prefers shrimp. On a poundage basis, Americans consume about 71 percent more shrimp than salmon, according to the National Fisheries Institute (NFI). Alaska, unfortunately, produces a negligible volume of shrimp.
The organization did last fall report the U.S. was experiencing a “‘tinned fish’ craze,” but even there, salmon did not come into play. The craze, according to NFI, features “increases in consumption of canned tuna, canned shellfish and canned sardines.”
“Why do we think this swimmer is so deserving?,” the magazine asked. “These little fish are packed with heart-healthy omega-3s; skeleton-supporting vitamin D, calcium and phosphorus; 23 grams of protein per serving to help keep you satisfied and energized; and provide a host of other minerals.”
Sardines can be found off the coast of Southeast Alaska, but there is no Alaska fishery for them. Salmon didn’t make the Good Housekeeping list, although trout did. It was pitched specifically as an alternative to salmon “that provides those all-important omega-3 fatty acids, which support cognitive function and the immune system, help dial back inflammation and are associated with a reduced risk for chronic diseases.”
“Farm-raised trout is the second-largest foodfish sector of United States (U.S.) aquaculture, with the first trout farms established more than a century ago,” the study published there said.
It also forecast continued growth of trout farms but warned of problems with competition from “increasing volumes of imported steelhead and rainbow trout capturing the growing market demand for trout.”
How Trump-ordered tariffs now in play might affect those imports is an unknown. Those tariffs are now, however, another headache for Alaska salmon processors, given that most of Alaska’s high-value salmon is headed and gutted in state and then shipped to Asia for further processing.
It gets hit with tariffs when shipped back to the U.S. for sale.
“The idea that it makes sense to take salmon and send it all the way to China for processing” and then ship it back to the U.S. for sale “just tells you how much more expensive it must be to just hire American workers to do that work,” Reich also told the radio station.
Even finding Americans willing to do the heading and gutting in Alaska has become difficult despite the number of jobs in the processing industry declining due, in part, to automation.
And the processors have had to raise pay to even attract foreign workers. This drives up the processors’ operating costs and further drives down the prices they can pay commercial fishermen, about three-quarters of whom are Alaska residents, according to the state’s Commercial Fishery Entry Commission.
Much of the money paid those fishermen stays in the state, although many of the highest earners among commercial fishermen are non-residents. Little of the money paid to the 82 percent of the non-residents in the processing industry stays in the state. And the foot print of processors in the state is now so small that there is little value to Alaskans from the over-winter, caretaking of processing plants that used to take place up and down the state’s coast.
Economically, the only word that fairly describes the management of the Alaska salmon fishery as it has evolved as of this date is “train wreck.”
