Food for pets
Part 4 of a 4-part series
The road to hell on which the Alaska salmon fishing industry finds itself today was paved with good intentions that stretch all the way back to territorial days.
Territorial and later state efforts to social engineer the business to first create maximum numbers of jobs and later boost the incomes of fishermen could have come straight from the playbook of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which marched itself into an economic collapse.
These policies worked in Alaska when salmon were the rare-earth metals of their time. Then some damn Norwegians domesticated salmon, market forces came into play, and the very same Alaska policies sent the salmon business down the road that killed the USSR.
Were it not for federal government bailouts, the industry might by now have collapsed much as the USSR did. As it is, the way things stand today, the socio-economic tampering with the fishery has resulted in the $7.81 per pound (inflation-corrected) Bristol Bay sockeye salmon of 1988 falling to the $1.03 per pound price the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is reporting Bay fishermen were paid for sockeye this year.
Meanwhile, pink salmon, which made up just shy of two-thirds of the 2025 statewide salmon harvest, have become such low-value fish that processors can sometimes make more money selling them for pet food than canning them for human consumption.
Fish and Game reported that the 115 million pinks harvested this year were, on average, worth 96 cents each and contributed a mere 21 percent of the value of the state’s salmon while accounting for 61 percent of the harvest.
At 30 cents per pound, the average 3.2-pound humpy, as Alaskans call the fish, was worth less than a dollar.
To understand how things got to the point where one of Alaska’s most valuable resources is worth so little, one really has to go back to the 1950s, when commercial fishermen in Bristol Bay were restricted to netting their fish from sailboats in the name of job creation and inefficiency then thought necessary for conservation purposes.
This changed only after deaths in the fishery were blamed on sailboats swamped by bad weather. In the wake of those deaths, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed a move to powerboats. This was met with opposition in the name of job preservation.
Cannery opposition to powering the fleet failed, however, and “powerboats limited to 32 feet in length were allowed in Bristol Bay beginning with the 1951 season,” Toll noted. The 32-foot length limit was another old conservation and job protection provision.
It remains to this day.
Protectionism
The latter law, as the Board reported, “limits the number of licenses to individual participants in the fishery. If individual permit holders are allowed to gain (harvest) capacity after the fishery has been limited, the overall intent of the limited entry program is undermined….”
The Board’s position on the law echoes the limited-entry view of commercial fishermen rather than the view of state fishery managers, who saw limited entry as a means to restrict the number of fishermen to make Alaska salmon harvests more manageable.
Fishermen, on the other hand, saw limited entry as an economic protection act intended to ensure their short-lived, seasonal jobs would provide a year’s income. Some of the more entrepreneurial among them would get around the 32-foot restriction in the Bay by building ever wider boats or fudging the length of their craft in various ways, something Alaska State Troopers cracked down on in 2023.
Whether the 32-foot restriction actually worked as a job-protection measure in the region is questionable. When the state initiated limited entry in the Bay fishery in 1975, the records of the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission show 712 permits issued to Bay residents, 418 issued to other Alaska residents, and 745 awarded to nonresidents with an established history in the fishery.
Because the law stipulated a one-time issuance of permits that then became the property of the permit winners, a busy market for permits quickly developed, and many were bought and sold. As a result, the state agency reports that the number of permits owned by Bay residents is now down to 308, about half of what it was, while the reported nonresident ownership of permits is up to 1,032.
Commercial fishermen who come to Alaska from other states to fish the Bay for a couple of months each summer now comprise more than 55 percent of the fleet. Meanwhile, the change in jobs in the processing business has been even more extreme.
Uncomfortable working conditions and low wages are blamed for the lack of Alaska-resident employment in fish processing. Many of the workers there are from foreign countries, where Labor’s reported average earnings of less than $18,200 per person for processing workers go a lot farther than in Alaska or the U.S.
A lot has changed in Alaska since the 1950s, when the now-dead Alex Brindle was worrying about “over 1,000 local jobs.” And the biggest changes came with Alaska Statehood.
Monumental shift
When Alaska became a state in 1959, a ban on fish traps came with the upgrade from territorial status. The ban itself was officially issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife in March of 1959.
But it added that “on two recent occasions, Alaskans have voted overwhelmingly in favor of eliminating salmon traps” and the Service wants to “as rapidly as possible, adjust its actions to reflect the wishes of Alaskans in the disposition of their natural resources.”
The ban on traps promptly eliminated the most economically efficient means of salmon harvest in Alaska, the most environmentally sound means of salmon harvest in Alaska, and the best means of ensuring the quality of salmon harvested in Alaska.
When the ban was issued, there were reported to be 243 traps operating along the Alaska coast, and “the total take of the traps was limited by the number of days they were permitted to operate each week,” the Service said. “In recent years, traps have taken 25 to 40 percent of the total Alaska salmon catch.”
The general public was led to believe the traps were responsible for a significant decline in salmon numbers in Alaska in the 1950s, but that was propaganda, not reality. A cold North Pacific Ocean and high-seas salmon fishing by foreign nations were the real reasons Alaska salmon catches averaged only about 41,500 fish for that decade.
Harvests would increase slightly under trap-free, state management in the next decade before crashing in the early 1970s with the state fully in charge. The record-low catch in Alaska came in 1967, eight years after statehood, when the statewide harvest for the year fell to a now-unbelievable 20.9 million fish.
Harvests rebounded to reach more than 68 million in 1970, but that set the stage for the big decline: 47.5 million in 1971, 32 million in 1972, 22.2 million in 1973, 21.9 million in 1974 and 26.2 million in 1975.
And there had been years under federal management with harvests of more than 100 million salmon per year with the traps in operation. The real issue with traps wasn’t that they threatened Alaska salmon.
The real issue was that commercial fishermen in Alaska hated the owners of the traps.
Fox in the hen house
The canned salmon industry would remain a politically powerful entity in the 49th state well into the 21st Century. As late as 2010, cannery operators were trying to muscle the state into allowing a massive increase in the production of ocean-farmed pink salmon.
With the prices for canned salmon low, due in part to the growing number of net-pen salmon farmers channeling their salmon trimmings into cans, Alaska canners unable to generate higher profits per can hoped to grow their profits through volume. They chose to ignore indications that hatchery pink salmon production was already cutting into sockeye and coho salmon numbers and possibly those of Chinook, the fish Alaskans call king salmon. as well.
By then, the canners had lost some of their influence, though far from all, due to a major shift in Alaska production from canned salmon to frozen salmon. This was in part brought on by a 1982 botulism scare that followed in the footsteps of a couple being sickened in Belgium and one person dying.
But “even prior to the botulism scare, the industry had been evolving in response to the impossibility of coping with larger catches by simply canning more fish. A combination of declining real prices, dropping per capita consumption of the canned product and a
worldwide recession had stifled the product flow, produced costly inventories and reduced profits to both packers and fishermen,” consultants told the Alaka Fisheries Development Foundation in 1983.
No matter how industries might try to ignore market forces, they can’t keep market forces out of their business.
The Fisheries Development report also warned that the vast majority of the frozen salmon was going to Japan and that there was “a crucial need to stimulate domestic demand for fresh and frozen salmon products, a demand that had virtually disappeared in the post-war period due to price and lack of availability. Whole salmon, steaks, roasts, fillets and new products like salmon croquettes, patties, loaf and nuggets are meeting with growing acceptance by the American consumer, who has begun to rediscover this choice, increasingly visible, increasingly affordable form of protein from Alaska.
“Only time will tell, however, whether it represents a permanent change in the business of harvesting, processing and marketing salmon, or just a brief accommodation to unusually large supplies and slumping demand for canned products.”
What time finally told was that the consultants were wildly optimistic. The demand for canned salmon failed to keep pace with population growth. Researchers studying child nutrition in 2019 reported that canned seafood consumption in the U.S. “remained relatively stable at 2.6–3.5 lb (1.2–1.6 kg) per capita per year” from 1930 on, and most of that canned seafood was tuna.
Were this not enough, high-volume, net-pen farmers began to take over the market for canned salmon as they had taken over the market for fresh/frozen salmon. “…The farmed segment dominated the global canned salmon market in 2020 and is anticipated to maintain its dominance during the forecast period,” according to Allied Market Research.
As for those salmon croquettes, patties, loaves and nuggets the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation dreamed of, they never took off, while the high prices paid for filets and steaks in the late 1980s encouraged the fledgling salmon farmers in Norway to continue experimenting with the domestication of salmon.
By the start of the new century, Norwegian farmers were regularly producing salmon as tasty as those caught in Alaska, and in 2013 the foundation of the Alaska salmon business shook when the Washington Post gathered some of the capital city’s top chefs and fish buyers for a blind tasting of farmed and wild salmon.
The test did spur a heavy push for better-quality control in the Alaska salmon fisheries, but there is only so much that can be done when the fish are caught in gillnets, which often scar them; manhandled on the decks of fishing boats; and left flopping around until they die instead of being immediately dispatched.
Holding pens
Alaska had one of those better ways with traps, which could hold live fish until they could be gently scooped out to be delivered straight to a processing plant at whatever volume the plant was prepared to handle immediately.
But the state decided to kill the traps instead of fixing the trap problem.
The state could have done with the traps what it later did with oil, given that the tidelands on which the traps were located transferred into state ownership at Statehood. The state could have put the traps on leases on those tidelands. It could have demanded a royalty share of the salmon, a common property resource over which the state had authority, caught in the traps.
The state could have taxed the traps. It could have provided for some sort of Alaska preference in leasing. It could, conceivably, have manipulated all of these factors over time to largely shift the ownership of the traps out of the hands of those “outside interests” and into the hands of Alaskans.
But, instead, in the name of job creation, the state decided to ban the traps and issue a free-for-all invitation to join the Alaska commercial salmon fishing business.
The “new state Department of Fish and Game initiated research and conservation efforts, but these did little to improve the salmon runs in the face of a large influx of new entrants into the seine and drift gillnet fisheries,” Colt added.
All of which set the stage for the biggest entitlement program in state history: limited entry.
“By 1972, with runs again at an all-time low, Alaskans were ready to abandon the concept of open access to the salmon fishery. They approved a constitutional amendment legalizing the issuance of a fixed number of tradable, limited-entry permits,” Colt wrote.
These tradable permits created a wonderful retirement scheme for any number of fishermen. They could fish until they got tired of fishing, sell the permit the state gave them for free, and retire. Those who sold out in the late 80s and early 90s hit the jackpot.
An Alaska Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission (CFEC) study pegged the market value of a 1990 Prince William Sound seine permit at $1.2 million in today’s dollars. That value fell dramatically in the years that followed as the market for pink salmon, the big catch in the Sound, collapsed.
But it has crept upward since the mid-2000s with a high production of hatchery pinks in the Sound driving harvests to levels topping those of the statewide, all-species harvest of salmon in the early 1970s. Sound permits are now trading at $125,000 to $200,000, a long way from the $1.2 million of the last millennium but still four to five times higher than the inflation-corrected value of those permits in the early 2000s.
As was the case in the Sound, those prices began to creep upward as the volume of fish returning to the bay skyrocketed to partially make up for the new, lower prices paid for wild sockeye. But Bay permit values are still a long way from where they were.
Bay permits are now selling for $150,000 to $160,000 in a market where buyers are offering $135,000 to $128,000 in an effort to scoop up permits from fishermen struggling with boat payments in the wake of the pandemic-caused disruption in the fishery.
The 10-year average price, corrected for inflation to 2021, has hovered around $175,000 or less than an eighth of what the permits were worth at the end of the ’90s. And the Bay and the Sound are bright spots. Permit prices in some other fisheries have crashed.
Cook Inlet seine permits peaked in 1990 at a value near $1.2 million in inflation-corrected dollars. They are now selling at $50,000 or slightly less.
Values for Cook Inlet driftnet permits that hit an inflation-corrected value of near $700,000 in 1990 before plummeting to an inflation-corrected low of $31,000 in 2021 are back up in the $50,000 range, thanks to a strong 2025 showing of sockeye in the Inlet. But that’s only a fourteenth of their past value.
And there are no indications that Alaska limited entry permit values will ever climb back to anywhere near the price of permits in the good-old days, because the sales of farmed salmon now cap the global price at which salmon trade.
Alaska’s state-controlled effort to create decent-paying jobs now looks to have evolved into a state-controlled effort to create some good, part-time jobs for fishermen from Outside and low-paying jobs and/or part-time jobs for Alaskans. Most of the Inlet driftnetters are now hobbyists with non-seasonal jobs that pay their bills.
Meanwhile, a significant number of limited-entry permits go unfished because their owners don’t think fishing them is worth their time.
Entitlement
What the permits mainly did in the long run was create a sense of entitlement among Alaska commercial salmon fishermen that drove them to battle any change in how the Alaska salmon fisheries had been run for decades.
Instead of worrying about how to compete in the future with a flood of farmed fish, they worried – and lobbied – to maintain all as it once had been. Or in some cases, quit fishing and sat on their permits waiting for the good old days of high permit prices to return.
Of the approximately 8,400 salmon permits now in play in Alaska, 5,249 were reported to have been fished this year, “a decrease from 2024 (with) 5,304,” according to the state. Seven hundred of these were permits for the Kuskokwim River, where commercial fishing basically disappeared years ago in favor of subsistence fisheries, and about 750 were permits for the Yukon River, where there were no fisheries this year because of dismal returns of king and chum salmon.
But even considering this, almost a quarter of permits went unfished in a year when Fish and Game was projecting a massive return of more than 200 million salmon. And they largely went unfished because fishermen decided that there wasn’t much money to be made by fishing.
Alaska had in the 20th Century bet that wild-caught salmon – the state’s mix of wild and ocean-farmed salmon – would trump pen-farmed salmon in the marketplace in the 21st Century, only to have the decision prove the biggest mistake in the list of mistakes in the economic-engineering of state fisheries.
Alaska salmon harvests are now dominated by 3-pound to 4-pound pink salmon that do not yield the 3/4 to 1 1/2-inch thick filet consumers want to throw on the barbecue, slide into the oven or pan-fry restaurant style.
This is why Food & Wine magazine, in its “Expert Guide to Every Type of Salmon You Can Buy,” says that for pink salmon, “the vast majority is processed and sold in cans or pouches.” This was once the case, but considerable volumes of pink salmon are now filleted and sold frozen as a budget product, which does little to help the image of tasty wild salmon from Alaska.
Chowhound went so far as to label “Morey’s Fine Fish and Seafood Marinated Wild Pink Salmon,” the worst seafood one can buy at Costco. Topping its list of best frozen seafood was America’s favorite seafood, a shrimp, but “Nanuk Smoked Pacific Coho Salmon” did come in second. Chowhound did not say where that salmon was sourced because the website is more about how fish taste than their provenance.
Minnesota-based Morey’s is clear about where it sources its wild salmon – Alaska. Nanuk – a subsidiary of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada-based Oceanfood Sales LTD – is on the other hand a little cagey about their salmon’s sources, saying on the company website that “our products are sourced from both wild and farmed producers.”
But given that Nanuk once sold a smoked sockeye specifically branded as “wild,” a product now gone from its line, it is most likely the coho it is using are salmon being farmed in B.C. net pens or the land-based tanks of farmers running recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) in the province.
Many, including the Canadian government, believe RAS, a farming system under consideration in Alaska before the state’s 1990 ban on salmon farming in any form, is the future of the business, given the microplastics now being found in wild salmon and the concerns about a variety of chemical contaminants that can taint net-pen farmed fish.
But there have been some huge RAS failures. Arguably, the biggest involved the Apollo Aquaculture Group’s planned tower of seafood in Singapore. The company got a lot of attention in 2021 when it unveiled a $65 million, eight-story-tall RAS farm designed to raise grouper, trout and shrimp in what the Smithsonian Magazine described as “the small island city-state, which currently imports 90 percent of its food.”
The project failed miserably and three years later, The Straits Times reported the farm was “to be sold at fraction of cost amid (the) owner’s financial woes.” Years earlier, Intrafish, a trade website, compiled “a list of high-profile land-based aquaculture failures” comprising dozens of companies around the world trying to farm almost every imaginable species of fish.
The nature of progress
Still, RAS farms keep popping up, sort of like the personal computer manufacturers of the 1980s and 1990s – Commodore, Kaypro, Radio Shack, Compaq, Osborne and dozens more – that came and went.
Some computer companies, however, hung on and personal computers, whether in laptop or handheld form, are now everywhere. Salmon farms are likely to follow the same track. They are already adapting and mutating almost as fast as the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Cermaq, a Japanese-owned company operating in Norway, just days ago announced the launch of a wholly “closed cage” farm. Such fiberglass-cage designs are seen as the net-pen farmers’ answer to RAS.
Given that the technology is new, it will almost inevitably face unexpected problems as have the RAS operations. But some of the RAS farms that looked sure to fail now look headed toward success.
Atlantic Sapphire, a company that started a huge, land-based salmon farm in Florida of all places, looked to be doomed only a few years ago. Now Euronext Markets is reporting a “decisive turnaround” and “profitability insight” with both revenues and the weights of its farmed salmon doubling since last year.
That’s near the volume of the average, annual harvest of sockeye salmon in the Cook Inlet and the Copper River fisheries combined, and sockeye are the big money fish in both those fisheries. They also compete directly with farmed fish in the global market.
Unfortunately for both U.S. consumers and Alaska fishermen, the Alaska fish are available fresh for only a few months every year, while Atlantic Sapphire can supply fresh salmon year-round. And because the quality of salmon flesh begins to decline from the moment the fish is killed, the Florida company holds another advantage over Alaska; it can move live fish almost immediately into a processing plant.
In this regard, Alaska could improve its competitive position with fish traps, which also allow for fish to be held alive until killed and then immediately processed and flash frozen for year-round sale, but as noted above, the state banned fish traps.
Not the mention the bulk of the Alaska catch – those pinks – is not what the domestic market wants.
This is not to badmouth the taste of humpies, no matter how much some Alaskans turn their noses up at the mention of the taste of the smallest salmon. A troll-caught humpy – a fish caught on hook and line before entering the spawning phase then smacked on the head, immediately bled and promptly iced – is a fine-tasting salmon.
Markets, markets, markets
But all that really needs to be said about the general marketability of pinks as caught in the commercial fisheries of Alaska is written in the history of the fast-food business. There have now been two decades of experimentation with fast-food salmon, an attractive idea given the low prices of pinks, and not one fast-food salmon product has taken hold.
KFC was the last to trial a variety of salmon sandwiches in Japan, but none are on menus there now.
There are no indications that this is going to change in the future, either, or that Alaska is likely to see any significant increase in the value of the pink salmon that now generally constitute 60 percent or more of the harvest in most years.
Despite this, the state goes on managing for the maximum production of pink salmon and dismissing indications that pink numbers are suppressing returns of far more valuable sockeye, Chinook and coho salmon.
And therein, Alaska’s open-ocean salmon farming business shares a problem with what most scientists see as the biggest issue facing the far-from-perfect, net-pen salmon farming business as well as the cleaner RAS farmers going forward: feed.
The net-pen/RAS farmers have been trying to transform their operations in recognition of this.
Insects, a common food source for the young of some salmon species that spend time rearing in freshwater before going to sea, are seen as one of the biggest potential sources of salmon feed. A variety of insect farms are now in the feed production business, and the Salmon Business website earlier this year reported that a study conducted by the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in cooperation with a salmon farming business in that country and insect protein supplier Protix found that insect-feed had the potential to improve both farm yeilds and salmon quality.
“In consumer sensory tests, 67 percent of participants preferred the taste of salmon fed with the insect-based formulation,” it was reported. “Assessments of juiciness, firmness, and odour indicated improvements, though not all differences reached statistical significance.”
NOAA also notes that although some farmed fish “do consume more by weight of fish meal and/or fish oil then they produce in their final product form,” especially “carnivorous species new to aquaculture….At some point the species group becomes a net producer of fish. This is quickly becoming the case for farmed salmon and shrimp, two species groups that have been criticized for using more fish than they produce. Because the trimmings from farmed fish can be used to make fish meal and oil, aquaculture is also becoming a producer of these products.”
Dirty business
Where things get interesting is in the ocean, because salmon in pens aren’t the only “carnivorous species” taking a big bite out of “feed fish.” In the North Pacific, the combination of farmed and wild pink salmon have, in some years, been accused of gobbling up so much of the food base as to cause “trophic cascades” that ripple through the ecosystem, causing declines in birds, other species of salmon. other fish and marine mammals.
In some regards, the hatchery exploitation of forage fish, something the hatchery operators and Fish and Game like to paint as benign, might be worse than what happens with net-pen farmed fish.
Why?
Because 92 to 97 percent of the young pink salmon that go to sea eat and eat and eat are destined to die before returning to the waters in front of or somewhere near the hatcheries in which they were spawned. For net-pen salmon farms, on the other hand, the situation is almost the opposite.
Norway has reported that about 84 percent of the salmon that go into pens at Norwegian farms survive to reach a harvestable size, and Scottish farmers have reported survival rates above 82 percent.
These net-pen farms are doing 10 times better, or more, than Alaska’s open-ocean farms at converting wild “feed fish” into the salmon people want to eat. And the Alaska idea that dumping more than 1 billion hatchery fish into the ocean doesn’t have any effect on the ecosystem is just wishful thinking.
When hatchery pinks remove “feed fish,” some other carnivorous fish – other species of salmon, halibut, pollock, rockfish, etc. – seabirds or marine mammals pay the price. A now 8-year-old study that was looking for long-term damage linked to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in 1989, found no lasting effects from that disaster.
But the researchers stumbled on damage caused by another industry – the region’s large-scale, pink salmon production hatcheries.
“We do not know if possible deleterious interactions between hatchery pink salmon and wild sockeye salmon in this study are from predation or competition, or whether they occur in nearshore or offshore areas. Pink salmon feeding may cause a general depletion of prey availability that could impact sockeye salmon without tight spatial overlap of these two species. In this regard, the apparent impact to sockeye productivity may reflect a general increase in pink salmon abundance across the northeast Pacific rather than increased abundance of hatchery pink salmon to PWS in particular.”
Subsequent studies have documented coastwide declines in the number and size of sockeye, coho and Chinook salmon linked to the unprecedented abundance of both wild and pink salmon in the North Pacific, thanks in part to pink hatcheries in both Russia and Alaska.
Alaska officials have dismissed these studies with the trite observation that correlation is not causation, but have identified only one other possible causative factor – warmer ocean waters.
But if pinks are already enjoying a benefit over other species of salmon because of warmer water, as many scientists now believe to be the case, further increasing the number of pinks by adding hatchery fish would seem to be doing nothing more than hitting wild sockeye, coho and Chinook, or what Alaskans call kings, with a double whammy.
Alaska fishery officials, however, consider that view too “speculative,” embrace the fishing industry argument that the hatchery business has now become too big and too important to be allowed to fail, and pat themselves on the back for the large numbers of salmon being caught in the waters of the 49th state, even if the bulk of them are low-value fish.
The views are reflective of an attitude that has long been focused on trying to preserve what existed yesterday rather than recognizing what is today and trying to prepare for what will be tomorrow.
The state should have long ago begun looking for ways to improve efficiency in the commercial fisheries, rather than restrict efficiency, and it should have, in some areas such as Cook Inlet and parts of Southeast Alaska, begun shifting the catch of harvestable surpluses of salmon toward sport fisheries that attract tourists willing to pay far, far more to catch a pound of salmon than a pound of salmon is worth.
But at the economic level, Alaska fishing has been managed by Neanderthals, and sadly everyone knows what happened to the Neanderthals. They faded away because they failed to adapt.
Commercial salmon harvests in Alaska are never going to end because the cost of producing the fish is so low. But unless existing practices change, it appears inevitable that the value of one of Alaska’s most valuable resources will continue to decline.
What the future holds for the already low-value salmon going into cans is uncertain, but they are threatened by the same pressure from farmed salmon that pushed Alaska sockeye salmon prices down, down, down.
The reason for this is simple. The volume of farmed salmon production on a global scale is now reaching the point where the trimmings from the industry filets, the prime product, are entering the market in a canned form, primarily as pet food, which sells at an equal or higher price point than salmon canned for human consumption.
Identity brand “sustainable, fresh, never-frozen Atlantic salmon herring,” which uses fish meal sourced from Canadian salmon farms, is now selling at $5.42 per 13-ounce can. You can buy a slightly bigger, 14.75-ounce can of “Great Value Alaskan Pink Salmon” for $3.46 at Walmart grocery stores across the country.
Nothing about any of this is any good for the Alaska fishing industry, and there is no prospect for it getting any better in the future for one simple reason: Businesses either adapt or they die.
And Alaska has steadfastly refused to adapt. Brent Paine, a man way ahead of his time, saw this coming when he was a graduate student studying the salmon industry in 1991.
“The underlying decline in Alaska’s market share is clear,” he wrote then. “In 1985, Norway displaced the U.S. as the largest supplier of fresh/frozen salmon to Europe and last year became the leading exporter of fresh salmon to Japan.
“The failure (for Alaska) to provide for land-based tank farming of nonsalmon species of finfish…cannot be justified on biological, environmental or economic grounds. While the opposition to salmon farming is at least understandable, the extension of the concern to upland tank farming is incomprehensible. The passage of HB 432 (the Alaska salmon-farming ban) essentially means that one industry can effectively veto a potential competitor. Is that the way we are going to diversify our economy? Are we to apply this test to other industries?”
Had Alaska been wiser in 1990, the RAS technology developed in Norway, Israel and Japan might have been developed in Alaska, and Alaska might now be in the business of exporting that tech to the rest of the world. Instead, despite how global markets for fish have changed, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy now finds himself under attack for merely suggesting that the time has come for Alaska to think about allowing farming of non-salmon species in upland tanks.
Categories: Commentary, News, Outdoors
