Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Dunleavy’s bill to legalize fish farms seen as flaky by many lawmakers, interest groups

February 25, 2025 — A bill by Gov. Mike Dunleavy allowing fish farms in Alaska, which has banned them for the past 35 years, is getting a little bit of misunderstanding and a whole lot of opposition from legislators and interest groups, including some of his closest political allies.

House Bill 111 would allow inland farms for species such as tilapia, catfish and carp — but not for salmon, although some opponents of the bill are focusing on that species in their comments. In response, Dunleavy released a six-minute video on his YouTube channel Monday night defending his proposal.

“This bill does not allow the farming of salmon,” he said at the start of the video. “That is an iconic Alaskan species of fish, the five species of salmon. It also won’t allow Atlantic salmon to be grown in Alaska.”

“It allows mom-and-pop operations, families — whether you’re you’re in a city, you’re in a you’re in on the Kenai Fairbanks Matsu, or remotely — it allows you to legally be able to grow, for example, rainbow trout or Dolly Varden which, right now, there is no commercial fishery on that. There is no competition in terms of competing with our wild-caught salmon. But it will allow people to grow these, these, these fish in livestock tanks in their garage or livestock tanks out back.”

Read the full article at Juneau Empire

Trump order opening Arctic Alaska waters to oil leasindraws legal challenge

February 24, 2025 —  Environmental groups on Wednesday sued President Donald Trump’s administration to overturn an executive order seeking to open Arctic waters off Alaska, as well as waters in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, to oil drilling.

Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order, which revoked protective actions taken by Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, violated the federal Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, the plaintiffs argue in their lawsuit.

The law “authorizes the President to withdraw unleased lands of the outer continental shelf from disposition. It does not authorize the President to re-open withdrawn areas to disposition,” said the complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage and which the plaintiffs said is the first environmental lawsuit filed against the new Trump administration.

A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior declined to comment, citing a policy of avoiding comments on pending litigation.

Trump’s order seeking to open more areas to leasing, which was followed by an order by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum with the same purpose, comes at a time when previous ideas for remote offshore drilling in Alaska appear stalled or fizzled.

Read the full article at the Alaska Beacon

ALASKA: Alaska governor proposes lifting state’s longtime ban on fish farms

February 24, 2025 — Gov. Mike Dunleavy on Friday introduced a bill that would partially reverse Alaska’s 35-year-old ban on fish farms. House Bill 111 was referred to the House Fisheries Committee for consideration.

If signed into law, HB 111 wouldn’t allow salmon farming, but it would allow the farming of “any bony fish belonging to the osteichthyes class.”

That includes things like tilapia, catfish or carp — the world’s most widely farmed fish. Any farmed fish would have to be sterile, unable to reproduce if they escape into the wild. They would also have to be contained by an escape-proof barrier.

Fish farms would be subject to regulation by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and subject to oversight by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

Alaska already has a significant and growing number of shellfish farms.

Read the full article at the Alaska Beacon

ALASKA: Alaska fisheries observers experience harassment at much higher than reported rates, study says

February 21, 2025 — Fisheries observers in Alaska face workplace harassment, intimidation and assault at much higher rates than are reported, but the true prevalence is unknown as incidents largely go unreported, according to a new multiyear study.

Observers work alongside fishing crews to document scientific fisheries data essential to fisheries management, nontargeted species harvested as bycatch, and potential law violations of commercial fisheries operations, as mandated by federal law. Observers’ assignments can be aboard vessels or onshore locations such as harbors or processing plants, and can range from a few days to several weeks at sea.

The study focused on observers working in Alaska’s North Pacific groundfish and halibut fishery, which spans from the Bering Sea, to the Aleutian Islands and the Gulf of Alaska — the largest fisheries monitoring program in the United States.

“Observers find themselves labeled by industry members as ‘fish cops’ or ‘snitches,’ have been subject to intimidation, harassment, and assault (including sexual assault and rape), and have even gone missing at sea,” according to research cited in the study.

Study results estimate 45% of those who experienced harassment disclosed the issue in a given year, and that true prevalence of harassment varied from 22% to 38% of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration observers each year.

Researchers with the Alaska office of the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission and the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, and special agents at the Alaska Office of Law Enforcement, conducted the study from 2016 to 2022. Researchers say this is the first study to estimate rates of victimization and disclosure in a fisheries observer program.

“The goal of the project was really to discover what is the true victimization rate, trying to account for that problem we have in all crimes, which is underreporting,” said Craig Faunce, a study co-author. He is a research fisheries biologist with NOAA Fisheries’ Alaska Fisheries Science Center.

Read the full article at the Alaska Beacon

ALASKA: From Sea to Community, The Evolution of Alaska’s Community Development Quota Program

February 19, 2025 — For almost 50 years, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act has governed sustainable fisheries all around the United States. It supports 1.6 million jobs and tens of thousands of small businesses. It also supports one of the most enduring and effective economic opportunity programs in America, the Western Alaska Community Development Quota program, or CDQ.

The Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976, as Magnuson-Stevens was originally known, is known globally for creating the “exclusive economic zone,” which gave the United States control of natural resources from 3 miles (the end of state waters) out to 200 miles from its shores. The law evicted foreign fishing fleets from the bountiful fishing grounds of the Bering Sea, reserving it for a small but growing fleet of American fishing vessels. The Act also directs that local stakeholders appointed to regional fishery management councils decide how the fisheries should operate. Their decisions are made within firm statutory guardrails that mandate sustainability, minimize bycatch, and protect fishing communities.

America’s Bering Sea fleet was originally based in, and owned by, Seattle companies. When Congress updated Magnuson-Stevens in 1996, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens added the CDQ program into federal law, setting up a mechanism that would slowly shift ownership of the fleet from Seattle to Alaska. CDQ began at the North Pacific Fishery Management Council in 1992, the brainchild of western Alaska advocates who saw that most Bering Sea communities did not have an economic stake in the Bering Sea. The program sets aside ten percent of the fish harvests for a small percentage of the pollock harvest for 65 Bering Sea communities, most of which are majority Alaska Native. The communities are grouped into six regional non-profit entities. These “CDQ groups” harvest the fish on their own vessels or sell the harvest rights to fishing companies, then use the revenues to invest in the Bering Sea industry and fund economic development in one of America’s poorest regions: coastal western Alaska.

Read the full article at the Wilson Center

ALASKA: Alaska’s salmon fishery passes MSC audits, marking 25 years of certification

February 18, 2025 — The Alaskan salmon fishery has met all Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) standard requirements related to its hatcheries after a recent audit, allowing it to continue possessing its certification.

MRAG Americas, an independent assessment body, determined Alaska’s salmon fishery met the MSC’s hatchery management standards, which include comprehensive marking of hatchery-produced salmon to track the origin of fish to certain hatcheries. The tracking is designed to allow fishery managers to assess and regulate fishery contributions and interactions between hatchery salmon and wild salmon.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

USDA sends out second-largest pollock bid invitation ever; offers due by late February

February 18, 2025 — The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is asking seafood suppliers to bid on significant quantities of domestic pollock, shrimp, and catfish.

The agency is asking for bids on more than 21 million pounds of Alaska pollock fillets, nuggets, and sticks for household food distribution through food banks. Offers are due by 27 February for deliveries that will be made between April and June 2025.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: NPFMC adjusts proposals to reduce chum salmon bycatch by Alaskan pollock trawlers

February 18, 2025 — The North Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC) has advanced a set of five alternatives for reducing chum salmon bycatch in the U.S. state of Alaska’s pollock fishery, setting up a vote on implementing new protections as soon as December 2025.

Chum salmon populations in Alaska have plummeted in recent years; in the Yukon River, for instance, the fall chum salmon run is 97 percent below its historical average. The low abundance levels have led to fishery closures and bans on subsistence fishing in parts of the state.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Final federal decision on chum salmon bycatch slated for December

February 14, 2025 — In the wake of several days of lengthy testimony on chum salmon bycatch, a final decision for the issue is scheduled for the December North Pacific Fishery Management Council meeting in Anchorage.

In the interim, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is slated to publish its draft environmental impact statement on the matter in the Federal Register in August, allowing for 60 days of public comment to follow.

By the conclusion of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council meeting in Anchorage on Feb. 11, the body had amended some alternatives and was sending the analysis to NMFS for publication of the draft environmental impact statement.

Those changes included lowering a considered bycatch cap in some salmon corridors to 50,000 chum salmon, shortening the time frame by which they’ll take action, and also broadening the overall range of alternatives. The council did not indicate support of any specific alternative.

Read the full article at The Cordova Times