The 320-foot factory trawler Arctic Storm heads to sea/GAPP

Troubled image of AK largest fishery

Under fire for the incidental harvest of salmon, which some claim has devastated Chinook returns to the Kuskokwim and Yukon rivers despite any scientific evidence to support such a claim, the commercial trawlers who chase pollock in the waters off Alaska are now singing the praises of their economic benefits for the 49th state and their climate-change goodness.

The Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers (GAPP)  in September published not one, but two, economic reports painting the fishery as “a pillar of the Alaska economy,” along with a third study positioning their fishery as among the world’s best at minimizing greenhouse gas emissions while at the same time producing large volumes of quality protein.

Let’s get to the latter first:

“Alaska pollock has one of the lowest greenhouse gas emissions of any protein,” Peter Tyedmers, a professor in the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University, told GAPP members at an annual meeting in Seattle earlier this month. “When you look at the comparison charts, it’s hard to even fit the low impact of Alaska Pollock on the same chart with the other protein – especially with this latest, even lower, number.”

Tyedmers was contracted to update a life-cycle report on emissions first commissioned by GAPP in 2022. He reported that since then, the pollock trawlers have further lowered their emissions of carbon dioxide to kilograms of protein – the so-called CO₂eq ratio – from 3.77 to 3.09.

This is stunningly low when compared to beef,  a big greenhouse gas emitter. It has a CO₂eq ratio about 10 times that of pollock, according to Our World in Data, with beef’s number swelling to 71 – almost 24 times that of pollock – if methane emissions are added to the equation.

Pork, chicken and farmed fish are down at 10 CO₂eq, beans and rice at two, potatoes at 0.5 and nuts at 0.4, on Our World’s reported measure. Obviously, those who want to save the planet should eat more nuts, and stop drinking so much coffee.

Coffee is up at 29 CO₂eq – almost 10 times higher than pollock – and above the dairy cows that produce the milk for a latte at 16, although that rises to 33 if methane is added, putting the milk just below chocolate at 34 CO₂eq.

Who knew the damage that daily latte could do to the global climate?

Atmosphere friendly

Seafood in general, and Alaska seafood in particular, do well on what might be called the scale of atmospheric goodness. Alaska wild-caught salmon aren’t on the Our World scale, but fresh Alaska sockeye salmon were given a CO₂eq level of six in a 2023 study, putting them at the same level as fresh Norwegian, farmed salmon.

That study, published in Science of the Total Environment, also noted that most of the salmon emissions were linked to transportation systems geared at moving product quickly to market by air. Greenhouse gas emissions fell significantly when salmon were frozen or canned to enable the product to be shipped by slower but more efficient means of transport, such as ships and barges.

A study published in Global Environmental Change in March based on data collected in 2019 declared “the lowest greenhouse gas-emission (GHGe) product was canned sockeye salmon (at) 3.7 kg CO₂ eq/kg.” That would rank it slightly better than pollock in the old study, and only slightly worse than pollock if the new numbers are to be believed.

“Products with the lowest GHGe were canned, fresh, and frozen sockeye salmon, frozen pollock, canned and frozen tuna, and frozen Atlantic salmon,” the Global study reported. “Compared to findings identified in the literature, aquatic foods in this study were lower in GHGe than beef, had a range of GHGe that extended above and below pork and poultry, and had higher GHGe than most legumes and nuts.”

Alaska fisheries, that study noted,  benefited from the fact it takes “less energy per unit of production to catch fish that return en masse to spawning grounds – for example, salmon – or schooling fish – for example, Alaska pollock – and more energy to catch crustaceans, scallops and flatfish that use fuel-intensive methods such as traps, pots, bottom trawls and dredges.”

The best that farmed salmon could do in the Global study was a CO₂eq score of 7 for a frozen Atlantic.

“Compared to capture fisheries,” the study said, “aquaculture uses 54 percent less energy overall but emits 54 percent more GHGe. This finding is primarily due to the higher GHGe intensity of the main inputs into aquaculture production (for example, animal feed, electricity) compared to the main inputs for capture fisheries (for example, diesel fuel).”

Waste, another measure of environmental purity or lack thereof, is, however, a big plus for farmers.

After looking at waste in the seafood industry, researchers from the universities of Johns Hopkins, Townson, Florida, Texas A&M and Stavanger last year reported that in Norway, the “edible yield” of a farmed salmon was 76 percent “with nearly all waste rendered into fish meal or fish oil, pet food, and cosmetics. To our knowledge, the only part of the salmon that is not turned into a product is the blood.”

This was compared to Alaska’s Prince William Sound, where the same peer-reviewed study reported that the “edible yield of pink salmon was 52 percent of production volumes. The edible product forms were frozen, headed and gutted (66 percent of total production volume),
canned salmon (27 percent), roe (6 percent), and filets (1 percent), with a trend away from canned salmon and towards greater production of frozen head and gutted, which was shipped to Asia for secondary processing.

“An average of 43,600 tonnes (96.1 million pounds) per year of by-products were generated during the study period with 62 percent rendered and 38 percent ground and dumped into Prince William Sound.”

Or to put this in terms easier to understand, nearly 50 percent of the pink salmon (by volume) caught in the Sound go into grinders, and more than a third of what is ground up is dumped at sea as waste.

The Sound’s hatchery-driven, pink salmon fishery scores big points on one environmental scale – greenhouse gas emissions – because purse seiners are highly efficient at scooping up large numbers of fish and delivering them to a processing plant, unlike the high-value gillnet fishery for Copper River sockeye and Chinook which burns up a lot of gas and diesel to catch relatively few fish.

On the other hand, the Sound’s hatchery-driven pink salmon business looks awful on a separate environmental scale because of the volume of fish wasted. In some regards, it looks even worse than the pollock trawl fisheries.

The Marine Policy study,  notable for its URL-tag of “wasted food,” reported the pollock fishery “had a very low rate of discards (0.79 percent of total caught) and bycatch (0.04 percent),” and though its recovery of “edible product” at a rate of 38 to 40 percent was even lower than for pink salmon in the Sound, the fishery made up for that with far better utilization of the non-edible parts of the fish.

“Overall,” the study reported, “80 percent (802,000 tonnes per year) of by-products, including a small amount of discards and bycatch, was turned into fish meal or fish oil, and the
remaining 12 percent (217,000 tonnes per yr) was ground and dumped at sea. Unutilized byproducts were explained by one of three reasons: scraps that fall off the conveyor belt were not rendered, some plants exclude bones from fish meal, and most importantly some at-sea processors (three of 13 catcher-processor vessels) do not have rendering plants onboard.”

But how much Alaskans care about the “green” rankings of any of these fisheries is debatable because the big issue in the 49th state has always been about money. And in that regard, the major complaint against trawlers is that they pull fish worth hundreds of millions of dollars out of the water off the Alaska coast, and then haul the profits back to Seattle.

As some Alaskans see it, the state didn’t get much more out of the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1978, which created a “fisheries conservation zone” stretching 200 miles out to sea from the U.S. coast, than a change in the flags on the trawlers that once sailed east from Japan, South Korea and the now gone Soviet Union.

This view is not wholly accurate, but it can arguably be applied to the catcher-processor ships that haul in approximately half the average, annual quota of pollack. The other half ends up in shoreside plants that create jobs and produce some revenue for the 49th state.

Economics

A study prepared for the processors by Northern Economics conceded that Washington was the biggest beneficiary of the pollock fishery with about 40 percent of the industry’s $1.15 billion in labor income flowing to that state. 

But, the report concluded, Alaskans benefited to the tune of $337 million that supported more than 6,000 Alaska jobs.

Overall, the report added, “the greatest employment effects are in Alaska, where total jobs in 2023 were estimated to be 6,318. Alaska’s direct and indirect employment exceeds the levels in Washington, particularly indirect jobs.

“Alaska had over 900 more indirect jobs supported by the Alaska pollock industry than
Washington, reflecting that spending on goods and services is higher in Alaska. Total employment effects were estimated to be 5,045 jobs in Washington, and 421 jobs in Oregon,” bringing the Pacific Northwest total to 5,466.

The Alaska jobs leveraged the industry’s total economic output to more than $830 million in the 49th, but the state of Washington came out better there with an estimate topping $960 million, largely due to the capital investment in Seattle-based trawlers.

When it came to taxes paid the state of Alaska, boroughs and cities, the trawlers looked like the rest of the state’s fishing industry in that they didn’t pay much. The report put the number at $21 million.

For comparison sake, that’s just less than half the revenue the state collects from taxes on alcohol and significantly less than the $33.1 million it takes in via tobacco taxes, according to the state’s Revenue Sources Book. It is also not much more than the $19.6 million the cruiseship industry pays the state for “Large Passenger Vessel Gambling.”

The oil and gas industry remains the state’s cash cow. It is still producing about $1.9 billion per year in revenue while the state feeds on another nearly $3.8 billion in investment income from the Alaska Permanent Fund created with earlier oil revenues.

There is, however, no doubt about the value of the trawl-industry contribution to the remote villages in far Western Alaska that hold Community Development Quotas (CDQs) allowing them to harvest pollock and help create jobs.

Northern Economics noted its estimates did “not include the indirect and induced effects associated with the millions of dollars spent on (CDQ) programs and projects in the state. Because of this, the estimated total economic contribution of the Alaska pollock fishery is underestimated.

“As described in the CDQ annual reports, a significant proportion of CDQ spending is targeted to supporting local fishing industries and communities, through grants and scholarships, training programs, and other purposes. In total, direct spending on programs and projects is estimated to total over $51.7 million in 2023, approximately 32 percent of total spending, based on interviews and information available in annual reports.”

The CDQ program has been so successful that a significant amount of the opposition to the pollock trawl fishery in Alaska comes from rural, inland communities that couldn’t get in on the CDQ program.

Those communities do, however, reap some benefits, according to the McKinley Research Group, which the pollock producers had hired to study the “Importance of the Alaska Pollock Fishery to Alaska Transportation and Fuel Networks” while Northern Economics was examining the industry’s economic output.

“The Alaska Pollock Fishery Alliance commissioned this study in the context of several legislative, legal, and regulatory threats to the Alaska pollock fishery,” McKinley said. “While none of the threats would explicitly prohibit all Alaska pollock fishing, these threats when combined with recent challenges to Alaska seafood markets could significantly impact the profitability of the Alaska pollock fishery in general, making this scenario possible.”

The study suggested significant ripple effects if major cuts were made in pollock quotas or if the fishery was shut down, as some are demanding. Among the forecast consequences:

• “Decreased domestic freight service to Southwet Alaska and to a lesser extent
  Kodiak…mak(ing) it more difficult and expensive to get products like groceries, construction materials, and vehicles to the region.”
• “Increased fuel costs in Southwest Alaska,” given that the pollock fishing business is the region’s biggest fuel consumer.
• And decreased air service to Southwest Alaska as a result of reductions in worker travel driving down demand.

The report also cited Alaska’s shore-based processors as those most threatened by any major reductions in pollock harvests or closure of the fishery.

“Processing plant interview participants indicated an Alaska pollock quota reduction of 25 to 50 percent would lead to annual operating losses for their Southwest Alaska operations that would require them to close these facilities,” the report said, and “an Alaska pollock fishery closure would influence the business models of shoreside processors in regions without significant Alaska pollock fisheries like Bristol Bay and Southeast Alaska if shipping companies had to increase rates statewide to adjust for the loss of Alaska pollock volume.

“For example, Trident Seafoods operates five shoreside plants in Alaska and would see the most direct impact of an Alaska pollock closure at the company’s Akutan and False Pass plants in Southwest Alaska However, non-Alaska pollock plants in Cordova, North Naknek, and Wrangell would not be viable without an Alaska pollock fishery, based on the way the company anticipates statewide freight rates would change” with the disappearance of the state’s largest fishery.

But this wouldn’t be anything new. Alaska already has a long, rich history of seafood processors abandoning the state.