The lowly pink salmon, Alaska’s biggest catch; China’s biggest salmon export/Wikimedia Commons

The global humpy leader

Scientists can argue about the ecological consequences of Alaska salmon hatcheries helping to flood the North Pacific Ocean with pink salmon, but what appears clear now is that no one can argue about where the biggest profits from these industrial-scale salmon factories go.

A new Congressional report implicates them in helping the Chinese turn the commercial fishing business “into a unified geopolitical weapon.”

The report from the House’s Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party is focused on “the People’s Republic
of China’s role as the world’s leading offender of illegal, unreported, and
unregulated (IUU) fishing.”

Buried within the report, however, is previously hard-to-find information about just how much Alaska pink salmon, the lowest value of Alaska salmon by far, has been legally flowing from Alaska to China to be processed and sold since the start of the new millennium.

“Beijing cannot decide where fish swim,” the report notes, “but it has learned to control
where they land, where they are processed, and how much they are worth.”

What the Chinese have helped to make pink salmon worth in the 49th state, according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game data, is about 38.8 cents per pound on average over the 10 years from 2015 to 2024.

What the Congressional report indicates is that in the years since an Alaska-based company,  Silver Bay Seafoods, pioneered a new model of heading and gutting pinks in Alaska and then shipping them to China for processing, a huge volume of the fish Alaskans call humpies has been flowing across the Pacific every summer.

The Congressional report says that China imported an annual average of 140,368 metric tonnes of pink salmon in 2022 and 2023. Most of these fish came from Russia, which sells humpies for even less than Alaska, but 38 percent of the pinks – some 53,339 tonnes – arrived in China from the U.S.

And while domestic salmon consumption is growing in China, a June study published in the journal “Sustainable  Futures,” reported that these “Pacific salmon are almost exclusively imported for re-export.” China’s domestic consumption, like that of most of the rest of the world, is now focused on net-pen farmed Atlantic, coho and Chinook salmon, the British and Chinese authors of that study reported.

Alaska pink salmon is processed by the Chinese and comes back to the U.S. in the form of “Great Value Frozen Wild Caught Pink Salmon” at Walmart, Trident Seafoods Alaskan Salmon Burgers at Costco and other salmon products.

The simple reason for this is economics. As the late Chuck Bundrant, the founder of Trident, explained, as all Alaska processors began shifting toward China, “there are 36 pin bones in a salmon. and the best way to remove them is by hand. Something that would cost us $1 per pound labor here, they get it done for 20 cents in China.”

“The industry’s reliance on Chinese re-processing is (however) detrimental to the Alaska Seafood brand and makes the industry vulnerable at a time of rising tensions between the U.S. and China,” the McKinley Research Group warned in “An Alaska Seafood Re-a shoring Analysis” prepared for the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation in June.

The state’s response to this problem to date has been to try to prop up the existing processing structure that, according to McKinley, sent nearly 40 percent of all state seafood to China for processing in 2014. Tariffs have since pushed the percentage down to just under a third, but that’s largely because offshore shipments of Alaska seafood have shifted elsewhere.

As the McKinley report notes, “China is the largest re-processor of Alaska seafood, but significant overseas re-processing also takes place in Southeast Asia and Europe.”

A mountain of humpies

The tonnage of Alaska pink salmon going to China is now staggering. As reported by the House committee, it works out to approximately 117.6 million pounds per year in 2022 and 2023.

The McKinley report puts the 2023 Aalska export volume of pinks to China at a much smaller 69.5 million pounds (31,524 metric tonnes), but notes the shipment to that country ofanother  1.23 million pounds (56,130 metric tonnes) of fish meal.

What percentage of ground-up pinks are included in that total is unknown, but Alaska hatcheries have been reported to be selling millions of pounds of broodstock carcasses at prices as low as 5 cents per pound. Those fish aren’t considered fit for anything but fishmeal production.

To put the numbers in the Congressional report in perspective, the entire 2024 harvest of Alaska humpies totalled 124.3 million pounds, according to Alaska state data. And those were whole fish.

Nearly all of the fish being shipped to China are headed and gutted.

“Typically, 25 to 28 percent of the weight of wild salmon is lost in heading and
gutting during processing,” according to research conducted by the University of Alaska’s Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER).

Given this, the volume of Alaska pink salmon available for export in 2024 would have been about 92.3 million pounds or about 78 percent of what China was annually importing in 2022-2023. The even-numbered year of 2024 was not, it must be noted, a great year for pink salmon production in Alaska because even-numbered years never are.

Even-year pinks and odd-year pinks are genetically distinct, and the odd-year fish have been dominant for decades now, with that dominance only growing since the state went heavily into the business of using hatcheries to ocean farm pinks, or “ranch” them as the backers of the state’s industrial hatcheries prefer to say.

Alaska witnessed a monster, humpy harvest of 468.4 million pounds in the odd-numbered year of 2023 on the heels of a 2022 harvest of a comparatively tepid 239.1 million pounds.

This works out to a total of 707.5 million pounds for an annual average of about 353.8 million pounds or 160,481 metric tonnes per year. If the numbers in the Congressional report are accurate, it would appear that 87 percent or more of this harvest was shipped to China.

Alaska’s few winners

This was good for the 279 seiner skippers and crew that the Alaska Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission reports fishing in Southeast Alaska, and the 240 or so seiners and crew the agency reports as at work in Prince William Sound. 

These fishermen catch the bulk of Alaska humpies, and the prices they are paid for those fish would surely be even lower if the buyers were trying to process the catch in North America.

The big attraction of Chinese processing, as the Congressional report notes, is cost.

Chinese “seafood processing dominance rests not on efficiency or innovation but on systematic cost suppression across every major input – labor, raw materials, energy, logistics, and compliance,” the report says “Through forced labor, tariff manipulation, subsidized utilities, state-controlled transport, and opaque corporate structures, Beijing built a processing system that makes compliance with labor, trade, and transparency standards a competitive liability rather than a legal baseline.”

For Alaska processors, the report calculates in-state wage costs of $1,250 per metric ton compared to mainland China labor costs of $325 per ton. Some of this nearly four-fold difference is offset by the higher cost of the headed and gutted salmon the Chinese buy, but far from all.

At the end of the day – with wages, operating costs, and shipping factored into the picture – the report concludes that it costs $850 to $1,500 more per tonne to process salmon in Alaska than in China, with the lowest production costs in the 49th state found in the Panhandle and the highest in Bristol Bay.

‘To keep seafood processing costs the lowest in the world, Beijing eliminated the biggest expense in the value chain: labor,” the report says. “Since 2018, the Chinese government has forced Uyghur and other Muslim minorities into ‘labor transfer’ programs – state-run initiatives that claim to fight poverty but in reality compel workers into assigned factory jobs – while North Korean overseas workers have also faced forced labor in the seafood processing industry.

“The cost gap is stark: In Alaska, seafood processors earn $16 to $18 an hour, rising to $20 to $23 with overtime, and employers cover airfare, housing, and meals (at) $734 to $1,500 per worker….In CCP forced-labor facilities, transferred Uyghurs’ wages effectively vanish into state coffers. Labor becomes a state subsidy – one no lawful competitor can match without violating international law.”

Alaska, for better or worse, has been complicit in helping the Chinese create this system. Silver Bay, a processing company begun in Sitka by Alaska commercial fishing permit holders, led the move to China in 2007 with the help of the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority and the City and Borough of Sitka.

Those two entities loaned Silver Bay $2.1 million to help it open a high-efficiency plant geared to cutting the heads off salmon, yanking out their innards, flash freezing the carcasses, and then shipping across the Pacific for processing.

Silver Bay’s connections with the Chinese helped it, in turn, become the now dominant player in the Alaska salmon processing business. The move also helped keep prices paid for pink salmon high enough that Alaska seiners kept fishing, and enabled the state’s private, so-called “non-profit,” hatcheries to continue making enough money to pay their employees more than most commercial fishermen earn.

Humpies remain a low-value salmon, but Alaska hatchery operators are no longer demanding that the state allow them to strip valuable roe from the fish and dump the carcasses as they did at the start of the century.

Bad old days

“The Department of Fish and Game and salmon hatchery operators…claim that roe stripping… is necessary to the economic survival of both individual hatcheries and the entire private, non-proft (PNP) program,” court documents from the early 2000s record. “In recent years, the harvests of chum and pink salmon have been so large that hatchery owners claim they have been unable to sell all of their salmon. Thus, faced with unmarketable salmon filled with lucrative eggs, hatchery operators find that their best economic option is to roe strip.”

Prices paid for humpies were down to 15 cents per pound when the new millennium began and fell to nine cents per pound – a penny short of a dime – by 2003, according to state data. Prices are slightly better now, though not great.

The price last year was 30 cents per pound, which is about double the inflation-corrected value of what was paid for a 2003 humpy. At 30 cents per pound, the average-size, 3.2-pound pink was worth 96 cents or almost exactly a tenth of the $9.56 value of a much bigger Cook Inlet sockeye worth $1.77 per pound at the dock, according to state figures.

And that 96-cent pink was worth even less when compared to the average, 5.3-pound Prince William Sound sockeye with an average price of $2.57 per pound, which works out to a value of $13.62 per fish on average. The Sound sockeye attract a premium because so many of them, including some “wild caught” sockeye returning to Sound hatcheries, attract a premium as “Copper River sockeye.”

Copper River sockeye are reputed to be among the best-tasting salmon in the world, although there are those who argue that’s more marketing hype than reality. The fish actually didn’t fare so well in a blind taste test undertaken in Seattle.

Whatever the case with sockeye, nobody argues for pinks, the big catch in the Sound, as the world’s tastiest salmon.

Humpies might be best described as the jug wine of the species, with Chinook, or king salmon as Alaskans call the fish, settling in as a world-class pinot noir; sockeyes as a fine Bordeaux-style cabernet blend; coho (silver) salmon as a great Zinfandel; and chum or keta, as these fish are often marketing, something akin to the best box wine in the market today.

All of these classifications of Alaska salmon do, however, carry the caveat of “properly cared for.” Salmon, like all seafood, is highly perishable. The flesh begins to degrade rapidly as soon as a fish dies, and thus prompt bleeding and processing are essential to preserving the best taste, which might help explain why farmed salmon, much-belittled in Alaska, has topped wild salmon in some blind taste tests.

The net pen farmers have the advantage of being able to basically send live fish straight into processing plants for almost immediate transformation from swimming fish to tasty filets. Alaska fishermen haul them around dead for hours or tens of hours before they are processed.

In the best-case, the fish are kept in chilled holds, which help maintain quality; in the worst case, they’re tossed up on a beach or left on the deck of an overloaded seiner for hours.

The quality-control issue is such that Traffic, a monitor of world trade, in 2007 reported that Chinese importers engaged in “inward processing trade,” which exempts from a 26 percent tariff because they are re-exporting after processing, have a “preference for Russian wild salmon, particularly from the north Kamchatka region” because they are of higher quality.

Alaska commercial fishermen, and especially those fishing sockeyes in Bristol Bay, have since then taken big steps to increase the quality of Alaska salmon, but the vast majority of 49th state salmon being shipped to China is pinks, and you can’t make champagne out of grape juice.

The money with pinks is in the volume, and the nature of the commercial fishing business as a whole is that most of the money to be made there goes into the pockets of processors and retailers, and little of it stays in Alaska.

This is because many of Alaska’s commercial fishermen are in-state for only a few months in summer and because the same applies to nearly all the processing workers. Overall, the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute two years ago reported that 62 percent of the state’s fishing revenue was going into the pockets of nonresidents.

And just last Feburary the Alaska Department of Labor reported that nonresidents now comprise 83 percent of the processing industry’s statewide labor force.  Many of those workers are imported for the summer from Latin America and Eastern Europe, because U.S. residents aren’t all that interested in working long hours in cold, wet fish processing plants. 

But those jobs are way better than being a slave in a Chinese processing plant, where all the money is flowing to the bosses and the government. And the Chinese are, or at least were before tariffs, the biggest money makers in the game.

The McKinley report concedes that “tariffs could dramatically change the feasibility of processing Alaska seafood in China. Recent U.S. tariffs imposed on imports from China (if they remain in effect) will make it significantly more costly to re-import Alaska-origin seafood processed in China back into the U.S.

“However, if China continues to exempt U.S. seafood used in the re-processing and re-export sector from import tariffs, it may still be feasible for processors in China to continue using U.S. origin seafood for exports to Japan, Europe, and other markets.”

The big downside to a shift from processing in China to reshoring to North America is that higher operating costs in Alaska, Canada or the Pacific Northwest would force processors to reduce what they pay fishermen for salmon, and that would not sit well for a powerful state fishing lobby already unhappy about prices paid for commercially caught salmon.

The McKinley report suggests that loosening environmental regulations, further expanding the federal work-visa program to allow ever more migrant workers into Alaska, investing in high-tech processing and lower costs of electricity, and amending the Jones Act to reduce shipping costs from Alaska to the Lower 48 could alter the dynamic here, but there are impediments to all of those changes.

Alaska salmon processors are already strapped for cash, making it too costly for them to upgrade to the filet and pin-bone removing machines now in wide use by salmon farmers; changes to the Jones Act have been discussed for years but have never gone anywhere; and major electric projects are, like processing plants upgrades, costly.

A $500 million plan for a Chikuminuk Lake hydroelectric project to power remote Bristol Bay died in 2014 because of costs and local opposition. The plan was to dam the lake outlet to raise the lake 60 feet in order to produce 3.4 MW of power.

The Nuyakuk River Hydroelectric Project, a run-of-river plan that removes the need for a dam, is now being studied. It has estimated construction costs of $120 million to $140 million, or about $20,000 per person in a vast corner of the state home to only about 7,000 year-round residents.

The Chinese, it would appear, have put Alaska and the U.S. in a position offering no cheap and easy solution to bringing more processing back to North America.

Update: This story was edited on Jan. 23, 2026 to include information from the “Alaska Seafood Re-shoring Analysis” the McKinley Research Group conducted for the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation.