The roots of disaster
Part 1 of a 4-part series
Thirty-five years ago, Alaska politicians and the politically powerful commercial fishing interests that had long punched above their economic weight in the 49th state were patting themselves on the back for being on the verge of cornering the global market for salmon.
A state-supported and financially backed open-ocean farming business was starting to pump out pink and chum salmon by the tens of millions. Foreign fishermen were in the process of being squeezed out of the waters off Alaska’s coast. A drive was underway to ban the high-seas gillnetting of salmon. And improved fisheries management was helping increase returns of wild fish.
Possibly most of all, though, warming waters in the North Pacific Ocean were boosting the ocean-carrying capacity for salmon. By 2018, fisheries researchers would be reporting that thanks largely to this enviromental shift, the number of salmon in the North Pacific had reached a peak never before recorded in human history.
Nobody could see all of this coming in 1990, but some of it was already obvious.
Only one cloud appeared visible on the horizon then, a fledgling but growing, net-pen salmon farming business producing something on the order of one-half to two-thirds the number of salmon caught in Alaska.
The enemy
Alaska’s answer to this potential competitive threat was to ban the use of net pens for farming salmon in the north, although the state’s “salmon ranchers,” as Alaska’s ocean farmers prefer to call themselves, would eventually be allowed to use net pens to fatten their young fish in hopes they would out-compete wild fish at sea and thus improve the productivity of the Alaska ranches.
No one, however, was thinking about this use of in-state net pens to help out hatchery interests in 1989 when the state was considering the net-pen ban. The thinking then was that the ban would stymie the growth of a U.S. domestic salmon farming industry, given that Alaska waters promised more potential for net-pen salmon than the waters of all the other U.S. states combined.
From this standpoint, the ban the state instituted proved highly effective.
There were few good sites for salmon farms along most of the rest of the U.S. West Coast, and though some farms did pop up in Washington state and Maine, Alaska’s publicly claimed reason for banning net pens – environmental protection – provided political leverage for environmental groups never happy with the farming of salmon, a business that comes with the many of the same pluses and minuses of the cattle farming that displaced the bison that once roamed the American West.
That conclusion might actually have been something of an understatement. Atlantic salmon were first brought from the U.S. East Coast to the West in 1874 and transplanted in the Pacific in an effort to establish a resident, California population. The transplant failed, as similar attempts to transplant the fish were destined to fail for almost a century.
Washington state tried in 1904 and failed. The Canadian province of British Columbia tried in 1905 and failed, but kept on trying almost annually through 1935 without success.
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife began growing Atlantic salmon at its Wizard Falls Hatchery in 1950s, and in 1958 managed to establish a catchable population of the fish in landlocked Hosmer Lake in 1958.
Efforts to do the same in the ocean were unsuccessful, but the hatchery did provide some of the eggs for the first net pen farm in Washington. It was established in 1971 by the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, an agency within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), according to a history compiled by Salmon Fishing Now, a website run by Canadian Sam Vandervalk, a fishing guide who advocates for the use of hatcheries to increase sport fishing opportunities.
Once a good thing
He and his disciples were, however, never able to establish a self-producing population of Atlantic salmon in the Pacific nor were other fishery scientists, no matter how hard they tried.
“Because this sea-going trout grows to a large size, willingly takes flies or lures in fresh water, and has excellent flavor, it is eagerly sought by anglers,” Washington fishery biologists wrote in 1999. “For these reasons, state fishery managers in the past have imported, cultured, and stocked Atlantic salmon with the hope of establishing wild populations which would provide
additional and unique fishing opportunities in the state.
“The release of Atlantic salmon smolts for the purpose of establishing runs in Washington by the department occurred in 1951, 1980, and 1981….None of these releases resulted in the return of adult Atlantic salmon. Attempts throughout the United States and world to introduce and establish Atlantic salmon outside the Atlantic Ocean have failed.”
The 1999 report was written in the wake of what were described as “catastrophic events” in 1996, 1997 and 1999, which led to the escape of “107,000, 369,000, and 115,000 Atlantic salmon, respectively.”
None of those escapees were able to establish feral populations. Twelve naturally spawned, juvenile Atlantic salmon were, however, discovered in British Columbia’s Tsitika River in 1998. That discovery led Fisheries and Oceans Canada to in 1990 establish an “Atlantic Salmon Watch Program” to search for more.
No similar discoveries were ever made, but the Tsitika report was used to hype the danger of feral Atlantic salmon in the years that followed and for more than a decade after.
“…Alaska considered allowing the farming of finfish; however, by 1990, it concluded that the dangers were too great to the wild system that Alaska currently depends upon,” the paper claimed. “The farming of finfish in Alaska was banned in 1990 to protect wild stocks from the danger of disease and pollution as well as the possibility of escaped farm fish displacing or breeding with wild fish.”
The true story
The latter claim was simply a lie. An Alaska Finfish Task Force set up in 1990 to consider salmon farming actually concluded that if the state managed things properly, “the finfish farming industry can be accommodated without significant threat of disease to wild and hatchery stock.” A state “genetics policy” already in place, the group added, was “adequate to protect the genetic integrity of the state’s fisheries” if farming was allowed.
But the task force stopped short of a complete endorsement of net-pen farming, concluding that “Alaska’s unique position as a leading seafood producer, and the broad range of potential types of finfish farming activities do not support an unequivocal ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as to whether any· particular type of finfish farming should be permitted. That is a political decision that will have to be made by the Legislature.”
The Legislature’s decision was to cave to pressure from the commercial fishing industry and impose a ban.
Brent Paine, a member of that task force, would in 1991 pen an “Analysis and Review of Policy, Decision Making and Politics Regarding Finfish Aquaculture in Alaska” and pose an interesting question. In that 229-page report, published by the University of Oregon, he asked this:
“Given the evidence presented by qualified pathologists and fishery biologists that salmon farming poses equal or less risk to wild stocks than does salmon ranching, given the 20-year history of salmon ranching in Alaska and no known incidence of hatchery stocks negatively impacting the wild stocks, given that salmon ranching is quite accepted in Alaska as a form of aquaculture, why do fishermen behave this way?”
Paine’s lengthy 1991 paper makes for interesting reading now with the Alaska salmon industry in disarray due to the competition from the salmon farms that have sprung up around the globe. It is attached below for those interested in diving deeper into the history. His speculation as to the answer to his aforementioned question was this:
“One possible reason is that commercial fishermen are the direct recipients of the state and private, non-profit salmon ranching programs. When the salmon ranching program was first implemented 20 years ago, total annual harvests of all salmon species averaged approximately 20 million fish.
“During the past five years, this average has been holding around 130 million fish. Because of
the depressed salmon stocks two decades ago, there was a move to do whatever was needed in order to restore the state’s salmon runs to historic averages. Enhancement by ocean ranching was an important instrument in achieving this goal.”
Once that goal was reached, the same commercial fishing interests spent decades expanding and protecting it with the help of Fish and Game, which was at the end of the 20th Century still actively promoting the idea that Atlantic salmon escaping from farms in British Columbia were a threat to Alaska’s wild salmon.
The bogeyman
From 1990 to 2002, the agency led and promoted a statewide hunt for such fish. And the rare findings of Atlantic salmon in Alaska waters got a lot of attention.
But only one of the fish was found north of Yakutat, according to state records, and none were ever found spawning or attempting to spawn anywhere in the state. Alaska’s Atlantic salmon program was scaled back in 2003 and quietly abandoned in 2013 with only 59 Atlantic salmon escapees having been reported in Alaska in the previous 10 years.
In retrospect, given the decades of failed efforts to grow Atlantic salmon in the Pacific, something well-known to fishery scientists (not to mention the fact that no one ever proposed farming Atlantic salmon in Alaska; the plan was to farm native coho, a fish now widely farmed in Chile), the state agency’s main goal would appear to have been to put further pressure on Canada to ban the B.C. farms providing fresh farmed salmon in competition with Southeast commercial trollers, then fishing nearly year-round.
Canadian fishery biologists, it should be noted, ran their own search for feral Atlantic salmon from 1991 to 2003 without finding any established populations of the fish. A 2015 update on the program reported that “field surveys recommenced in 2011-12 (but) only on systems deemed at highest risk of having established feral populations.
“No Atlantic salmon adults or juveniles were identified in any of these surveys.”
Still, fears of what could happen killed net-pen salmon farming along the U.S. West Coast, and left the net-pens of British Columbia, which are still producing fish, under constant attack from environmental groups.
Alaska, in this sense, turned out to be the leader in a successful battle to stall the production of farmed salmon in the U.S. and control the growth of the business along the shores of Western Canada. But Alaska badly lost the economic war with net-pen farmed salmon.
The state’s domination of the global salmon market was dead by the start of the new millennium. And, though the state, with the help of its open-ocean farming of pink and chum salmon, was consistently producing more salmon than at any point in state or territorial history, the value of those fish was steadily creeping downward.
Today, about a third of the annual Alaska salmon harvest is credited to hatchery fish, which is something that looks good on paper.
But on an annual basis, 80 to 90 percent of those hatchery fish are low-value pinks and chums. The state never lived up to a 1983 promise to produce an annual hatchery harvest of 8 million sockeye, 1.5 million coho, and 300,000 Chinook salmon.
In the years since ’83, the goal for coho, or what Alaskans often call “silver salmon,” has been met once. And the goals for sockeye, and Chinook, which Alaskans usually refer to as “king salmon,” have never been met.
Worst of all, however, the market domination of “wild caught” salmon – the Alaska mix of wild and hatchery-produced fish – that existed almost to the end of the 20th century is long dead, crushed beneath a flood of farmed salmon.
The idea that banning salmon farms in Alaska would protect the state’s salmon fishing business proved a pleasing but temporary fallacy.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations reports Norway, a Scandinavian country slightly larger than the state of New Mexico, has become the world leader in the production of salmon. Norway today boasts fishery exports of nearly $16 billion per year. The entire United States doesn’t even make the top-10 with total seafood exports worth $4.9 billion.
And Alaska, which is credited with hauling in just shy of two-thirds of the U.S. seafood harvest and providing 60 percent of U.S. seafood exports, accounts for but $2.8 billion of that export value. Overall, the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) estimates the entire industry is worth $6 billion to the state with a third of that – $2 billion – tied to the sale of salmon both domestic and exported.
Next: The mother of all changes
Categories: Commentary, News, Outdoors
