Alaska’s ‘Wild’ Product of Asia
A news analysis
With President Donald Trump reguarly ordering or threatening new tariffs to balance the country’s nearly $300 billion trade deficit with China, the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute has gone searching for alternatives to China for cheap processing of 49th state salmon and bottomfish.
The aim of these meetings, supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was to “help expand Alaska seafood re‑processing options outside China. The Philippines offers skilled, cost‑effective labor for re‑processing, while Malaysia provides strong technical capacity and Halal-certified facilities,” according to an ASMI statement.
Cost-effective is in this situation a synonym for cheap. How exactly a search for offshore processing with cheap labor benefits Alaska in general is unclear, but ASMI seems determined to find a way to help processors earn bigger profits from the cheap pink salmon that now dominate the Alaska salmon harvest.
Pink salmon accounted for approximately 61 percent of last year’s catch of nearly 195 million salmon, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, but the statewide, average price paid for the fish was only 30 cents per pound.
Unfortunately for Alaska’s economy, those Chinook are becoming rare. The statewide harvest of fewer than 182,000 was a third of the catch of the 559,000 in 1974 when the Alaska commercial salmon fishery was considered to be in a state of crisis.
The statewide, all-species harvest that year was but 21.8 million, a catch about a ninth the size of this year’s harvest. This was in large part due to a 1974 catch of only 9.9 million humpies, a harvest a 12th the size of this year.
The crisis of the early 1970s led Alaska’s then tax-paying voters to approve a number of multi-million dollar bond issues to build a statewide hatchery system to produce more salmon while encouraging and supporting a variety of private, non-profit hatcheries authorized to both produce and harvest large quantities of Alaska salmon.
The state hatcheries, later turned over to commercial fishing interests to run, helped turn Alaska into humpy heaven as the North Pacific Ocean warmed to give the smallest of the species an ecological advantage that helped swell their population to numbers never before seen in human history.
Unfortunately, the market demand for 3.2-pound salmon is low, which pushed the price of the fish down from the 36.25 cents per pound, which amounts to an inflation-corrected $2.59 per pound, that they were worth in 1973, according to state reports.
As a result, to squeeze profits for commercial fishermen out of these now 30-cent per pound salmon and even more abundant pollock, and some other whitefish for which market demand is low, someone has to find really cheap ways to turn these fish into saleable products.
Thus came a move to China, led by fishermen-owned Silver Bay Seafoods, and now a search for other cheap alternatives in Southeast Asia.
“ASMI contractors provided highly technical trainings where participants took part in live filleting demonstrations featuring Alaska pollock, Pacific cod, rock sole, and pink salmon, as well as a taste test of Alaska pink salmon prepared by USDA Chef Trainer Gilda Sandique,” ASMI reported.
The good old days
Only a handful of those canneries, and the jobs they once created, are left. Exactly how many are operating now is hard to say because the state doesn’t specifically categorize salmon processing operations, but Laine Welch, a mouthpiece for the commercial fishing industry, in 2021 reported in a column published by the Anchorage Daily News that “canned fish today accounts for only about 5 percent of Alaska’s salmon products.”
“The majority of so-called ‘canneries’ are really fresh frozen plants that clean and freeze whole fish, which are later sold. The plants themselves are usually permanent structures found in coastal Alaska towns convenient to major fishing areas.
“These onshore processing outfits employ the majority of first-time workers and people traveling to Alaska to work each summer (especially college students). Most work requires little or no special training. As you’ll see, though, the work can be wet, cold, and monotonous. The possibility of making good money in a short time is a major incentive for workers. Earnings of over $7,000 for only two short months of work are common during a good season.”
Because of the seasonal nature of this work, and its “wet, cold and monotonous” nature, the Alaska Department of Labor reports that nonresidents now comprise 83 percent of the processing industry’s statewide labor force, and ASMI has revealed that 62 percent of the state’s overall commercial fishing revenue goes into the pockets of nonresidents.
The latter number is smaller than the former because commercial fishermen, overall, make considerably more money each summer than processing workers, and because, according to ASMI, 53 to 54 percent of those fishermen claim Alaska residency.
Non-resident commercial fishermen are not a wholly bad thing. They help boost the Alaska economy by spending significantly more money in-state than processing-plant workers, many of whom come from Latin America or Eastern Europe and are saving every penny they can to take home with them when they leave Alaska after the short summer fishing season.
Unfortunately, the number of fishermen, both resident and nonresident, making money in Alaska is small and shrinking. According to the state’s Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission, there were 10,587 commercial salmon fishing permits in the hands of fishermen in 2024, the last year for which full information is available.
But only 5,267 of those permits were fished. This is pretty much the norm due to fisheries that are closed because of salmon shortages or fishermen who decide that fishing won’t produce enough money to make it worthwhile in a given year.
The data would indicate salmon fishing provides jobs for only about 2,850 resident, Alaska salmon skippers, and few of them make a living wage from fishing. For many, commercial fishing is a part-time summer job or hobby that sometimes earns them less than that $7,000 reported for college students working the slime line in processing plants.
Commercial hand trollers in Southeast Alaska reported gross earnings of $4,248 in 2021, and gillnetters in Norton Sound didn’t do much better that year at $4,409. Commercial salmon setnetters in Cook Inlet reported earning $6,452 for the year, but they haven’t fished at all for several years now because of their historical unwillingness to try to find a way to limit the bycatch of Chinook (king salmon) now being considered for placement on the federal Endangered Species list.
The reality of the situation here is that the Alaska commercial salmon fishery, once a mainstay of the Alaska economy, has been in decline for a long, long time, and all indications are that this will only continue, with other Alaska fisheries not doing all that much better in general.
If fishery processors had the capital, which they don’t because their profits are so small, the jobs the industry provides in Alaska would shrink even faster. The economic path forward in fish processing is automation, which is now in wide use by salmon farmers in Norway, Chile and elsewhere.
Industrial revolution
The Norwegians have for years been running nearly fully automated salmon processing plants, and processors in other nations who can afford the upfront investment costs in machinery are following suit.
“Commercial-grade fresh fish cutting machines require capital investments ranging from $50,000 to $250,000, creating adoption challenges for small-scale processors. (But) the payback period of three to five years deters immediate investments.”
Automated heading and gutting machines for wild Alaska salmon have been tested, but are only just beginning to come into use in the state. Even without the machines, however, the number of jobs in the Alaska seafood processing industry has been declining as ever more the salmon fishing business transitions to the model of heading and gutting salmon in Alaska, freezing them, and then shipping them elsewhere, usually to Asia, for further processing.
The Alaska Department of Labor’s “Economic Trends” in November reported a 7.6 percent decline in seafood processing jobs for 2024 that followed an 8 percent decline in harvesting jobs in 2023 despite a harvest of 230.2 million salmon, the fourth largest catch in a state and territorial history dating back to the start of the 20th century.
Processing jobs did tick up slightly in 2023 because of the massive size of that year’s harvest, but the trend line for these jobs has been heading steadily downward for nearly a decade, and state economist Dan Robinson in 2023 warned that “the seafood processing sector is in the middle of a shakeup” due to its marginal profitability.
State economist Joshua Warren reported a situation no less grim as he wrapped up the 2024 season by observing that a fishing industry that took a hit during the pandemic has not bounced back like other seasonal, Alaska industries such as tourism and construction.
“Seafood harvesting has continued to struggle, facing several substantial obstacles,” he wrote. “Rising costs are one factor, and while high startup costs have likely deterred some new entrants, even current permit holders are fishing less as it becomes less profitable. The number of permit holders fishing has steadily declined since 2019, compounding
job losses when related crew aren’t needed.”
The fish-catching jobs might bounce back if the prices of fish go up, though the global market for salmon is now so highly competitive that it’s hard to see that happening. But the loss in processing jobs is a trend only expected to continue as the industry continues to automate where and when it can afford to do so.
Seattle-based Trident Seafoods had big plans for a highly automated processing plant in Unalaska when the decade began, but progress on that plant has been slow. Trident started construction of a bunkhouse in 2023, but later that same year announced that it had “reevaluated its 2024 plans to begin construction.” A company statement said groundbreaking on the plant itself wasn’t expected until 2025.
With “a projected three-year build plan, the new timeline means the plant would be operational no sooner than 2028,” the statement said. Work has gone slowly since, and economic conditions have not shown much improvement from 2023 when Trdent CEO Joe Bundrant observed that he’d “been in the industry a long time and I’ve never seen markets like this.
Near the end of 2023, Trident announced a major restructuring and began selling off many of its Alaska assets, saying that it wanted to “focus investments on modernizing and retooling its remaining processing plants throughout Alaska.”
Trident is the nation’s largest seafood company with 7,700 employees in 20 fish processing facilities in Alaska and the lower 48 states, plus a reported 20 “value-added processing plants
and sales or support offices” in other countries, two shipyards, 27 company-owned trawlers and catcher-processors, and an affiliated fleet of 650 independent fishermen.
“Over the past two decades,” the report did note, “Trident has increased utilization rates to achieve almost zero source waste. We’ve developed new products from material that would have previously been wasted. These include methods of increasing raw product use, such as salmon and pollock burgers and pet food, as well as secondary product recovery for fish oil, fish meal and salmon-protein concentrate.”
Turning Alaska’s overly abundant pink salmon into food for pets is looking like it could be more profitable than packaging those fish for sale to humans. And cutting down on waste is following the lead of the market-dominating Norwegian salmon farmers who’ve become masters at squeezing every last cent out of a salmon carcass.
Trident would appear committed to following Norways lead into automation and robotics as well.
“We’ve…provided our engineering team members with opportunities to attend the Mechatronics program at Clover Park Technical College in Washington,” the report said. “This
innovative, cross-disciplinary program gives participants the mechanical, electrical, telecommunications, control and computer engineering skills they need for the design
and production of automated industrial equipment, a highly valuable skill that ensures our processing facilities operate as efficiently as possible.”
This is all good for the company and its smartest employees, but it does not bode well for Alaska, especially rural Alaska. The fewer the number of people working in Alaska fish processing plants, the less the need for infrastructure – bunkhouses, mess halls, equipment storage faclities and more – requiring employees in Alaska to provide overwinter monitoring and maintenance.
Downsizing of this sort, as plants automate, can ripple through communities with already small, sometimes tiny, off-season populations in land where the off-season is measured in seven or eight months or more. And there are indications of ‘modernization’ of a sort that even the Norwegians have found troubling.
As that country’s processing plants have become larger and fewer with the distance between them increasing, Norwegian researchers have reported the development of a “well-boat” industry that transports live salmon to slaughter.
“Recently, vessels with slaughtering facilities on board have also been introduced to
shorten the process and reduce land-based capital requirements,” they wrote in a 2022 paper published in Reviews in Aquaculture. “In one controversial case, the Norwegian Gannet, the vessel is designed to conduct the whole primary processing process and land the fish in
Denmark and the United Kingdom. This may be efficient, but is challenging the social acceptance of the industry as it is removing jobs from coastal communities.”
But at least Norway still has year-round farming jobs rather than seasonal fishing jobs that last for only two to three months.
The future is always impossible predict, but the Alaskans of tomorrow may one day curse the Alaskans who two generations ago decided to farm salmon at sea instead of in such pens. Those Alaskans might even decide it would have made more environmental sense to raise salmon in pens.
Why? Because the environmental consequences of pens can be more easily monitored, measured and regulated than the environmental consequences of flooding North Pacific pastures with billions of young salmon, hoping that 3 to 5 percent of them will one day return to the hatcheries from which they originated.
There is now a big debate within the scientific community about how much ecological chaos is caused by the hungry mouths of the other 95 to 97 percent voraciously grazing the ocean pastures before they die.
Some see these pastures as inexhaustible, as the loggers barons of the U.S. once saw the forests of North America in the 19th century. Others claim the hatchery fish, especially those fast-growing humpies, are already causing ecological disasters to the detriment of not only other salmon, but also other fish, seabirds and marine mammals.
But the reality is that the interactions of the huge variety of fish living out of sight beneath the ocean waves is so complex that it remains impossible to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt which is the case.
