August 12, 2020 — Last year we warned of the slow economic death of Alaskan fishing communities as their access to nearby fisheries that they depend on becomes squeezed by off-shore interests, lawsuits and slow or non-existent political and regulatory responses. The first casualty came sooner than expected. In this case, a lawsuit by several off-shore corporate fishing interests has stripped the western Aleutian communities of Adak and Atka of their access to federal waters Pacific cod and doomed the only seafood processing plant in Adak. Golden Harvest Alaska Seafoods had invested millions of dollars in new equipment, product and market development based on a 5000 mt (11 million pound) Pacific cod federal waters set-aside developed over a nearly ten-year period by the North Pacific Council; the loss of that fishery lead to the inevitable failure of the plant and the collapse of the Adak economy, as predicted by industry stakeholders throughout 2019 and early 2020.
This past June Adak’s City Manager, Layton Lockett, announced that the Golden Harvest Alaska Seafoods operation had stopped buying fish and their crews had been sent home. In addition to Pacific cod, the plant had been processing crab, halibut and sablefish, and taking advantage of Adak’s military-built airport to fly live and fresh fish and custom processed seafood to US west coast markets. Some of those markets will now be supplied with foreign-produced seafood.