Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Bristol Bay fishermen protest low base price, lack of transparency

August 7, 2023 — By 9 am, over one hundred boats are anchored in the Naknek River entrance, some after a night of fishing the Naknek-Kvichak. Ivan Basargin of the fishing vessel Top Notch is one of them. He’s here to join the demonstration against this year’s low price. Basargin has fished in Bristol Bay since the late 1980s and builds fishing boats in the offseason. Standing in the wheelhouse of a boat he built, he says this year’s low-price hits hard.

“I’m going to pay my workers. I’m going to pay my bills. As far as living expenses, I haven’t decided yet. This 50 cents that I get, when I get home, it’s going to be a wash. I’m not going to have any money in the bank saved,” he said.

Organizers of the protest are calling on processors to reconsider and improve the base price this season from 50 cents per pound, less than half of last year’s price.

Without change, many fishermen say it’s unsustainable for the industry, and some say they will go home in debt. Basargin says he’s out on the water today because he fears accepting this year’s low base price will set a precedent.

“If they know we can fish for 50 cents, we’re going to get paid 30 cents next year,” he said. “That will happen if we don’t do anything. Like today – this is a peaceful protest. We’re not trying to block people or anything. We’re just trying to show the world that we’re hurting, and we need some help.”

Basargin says processors are claiming they are struggling financially too but he hasn’t seen evidence of this struggle.

“After a record fish catch last year, processors are complaining they are losing a lot of money. I see processors expanding. I see them buying other companies out,” he said. “If you look at the scenario, it kind of seems like they are putting a burden on us. They’re adding up their profits and expanding operations.”

Read the full article at the Bristol Bay Times

ARCTIC Act limits offshore aquaculture

August 1, 2o23 — On July 18 Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, introduced the Improving Agriculture, Research, Cultivation, Timber, and Indigenous Commodities (ARCTIC) Act, which, among other things, seeks to protect Alaska’s fishing industry by limiting open-ocean aquaculture.

Back in May 2020, then-President Donald Trump issued an executive order that gave the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration authority to approve fish farming in the open ocean. Murkowski’s ARCTIC Act will, if enacted, prohibit the arbitrary authorization of fish pens in the federal waters.

According to a summary released by Murkowski’s office, the ARCTIC Act aims to strengthen those communities, food security, and the seafood economy. Specifically, it supports domestic seafood production by increasing seafood processing in coastal communities.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

ALASKA: Fish plentiful, but fishermen scarce for Southeast Alaska’s first summer king opening

August 1, 2023 — The numbers are in for the first opening in the summer troll fishery for king salmon in Southeast Alaska.

The 12-day season saw more chinook landed than expected, despite fewer boats being on the water.

Southeast trollers brought in about 85,000 king salmon from July 1 to July 12, around 8,000 fish over the target for the first opener of the season.

At first, it might look like enthusiasm played a role, as it was only on June 21 that the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay that allowed the fishery to occur at all.

Read the full article at KCAW

Alaska pollock sector welcomes MSC eco-label push from McDonald’s China

July 30, 2023 — McDonald’s China recently announced that it will now include the blue Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) eco-label on its Filet-o-Fish sandwiches, Double Fish burgers, and Kids Fish Fillet burgers, served in more than 5,000 restaurants nationwide.

The initiative, according to Gu Lei, chief impact officer of McDonald’s China, “will continue to help protect the vitality of the ocean.” Gu described McDonald’s China as “actively building a sustainable supply chain to reduce damage to the environment through its seafood procurement.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: State asks U.S. Supreme Court to reverse EPA’s veto of Pebble Mine

July 27, 2023 — The state of Alaska is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court to resurrect the proposed Pebble Mine in the headwaters of Bristol Bay.

The state attorney general, with the help of a private law firm on contract, on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to repeal a January decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that in essence vetoed the mine.

Pebble would be a massive open-pit copper and gold mine on state land. The deposit is located upstream from Bristol Bay, Alaska’s most productive sockeye salmon fishery. The company hoping to develop it, Pebble Limited Partnership, says their mine design would ensure contaminants don’t degrade the fishery.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Alaska Official Hits Out at Marine Stewardship Council Over Russian Fish

July 27, 2023 — Alaska’s fish and game commissioner has tough words for the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), the seafood certification body whose familiar blue-fish logo can be found in every supermarket. MSC certifies the sustainability of fisheries around the world, based on stock levels, management practices and environmental impact – but not the politics or warfighting posture of the coastal state. Alaska Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang disagrees: he believes that Russia’s belligerence in Ukraine should be a disqualifier for Russian fishing vessels, and that Russian fish should not be marketed with the same “sustainable” check mark as Alaskan fish.

“MSC . . . has observed Russian actions in Ukraine, assessed the implications for its Russian client fisheries, and chosen a path of accommodation and appeasement,” Vincent-Lang argued in an editorial this week.

Vincent-Lang took a step further and accused MSC of ignoring the invasion in order to keep receiving revenue from Russian members. “[This] gravely misleads consumers and markets who believe that the seafood they are buying is certified to the highest environmental and ethical standards,” he asserted, and letting Russian fishermen keep MSC certification “denigrates the certification” of Alaska fishermen by association.

Read the full article at The Maritime Executive

ALASKA: Why sockeye flourish and chinook fail in Alaska’s changing climate

July 27, 2023 — University of Washington ecologist Daniel Schindler is at the mouth of a salmon stream at Lake Nerka, in Southwest Alaska. It’s roiling with fish.

“They sort of pile up in balls of thousands of fish for a couple of weeks. I think that’s when they’re doing their final maturation,” he said of the sockeye mob. “They’re jostling with each other and splashing, occasionally jumping.”

Schindler is in his 27th year of field work, studying Bristol Bay sockeye. This year is on par with the sockeye abundance Bristol Bay has seen in the last decade, he said, which is far higher than the historical average.

The unlikely hero of this story of plenty: Climate change.

“We tend to think of climate warming is bad news for wild animals,” he said. “But for sockeye Bristol Bay warming has been good news.”

For other salmon, climate change is a villain.

Chinook – or king – salmon are in terrible decline all over the state, and especially dire on the Yukon River. Meanwhile, sockeye – or reds – are having another banner year in Bristol Bay, and everywhere.  Scientists say they don’t know exactly why one salmon species is doing so well while the other is in crisis, but some clues are coming into sharper focus.

One key difference, Schindler said, is what kind of river habit each species needs.

Sockeye use lakes as their nurseries. Since the 1980s the water in those lakes has warmed significantly. The warmth stimulates plankton to reproduce more, and young sockeye eat plankton. Fifty years ago, Schindler said, a lot of sockeye spent two years in Lake Nerka before heading out to sea.

“And now they grow so fast that nearly all of them leave after a single year in freshwater, which is a reflection of the fact that the freshwater systems have become more productive,” he said.

Read the full article at Alaska Public Media

ALASKA: Alaska pollock sector welcomes MSC eco-label push from McDonald’s China

July 27, 2023 — McDonald’s China recently announced that it will now include the blue Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) eco-label on its Filet-o-Fish sandwiches, Double Fish burgers, and Kids Fish Fillet burgers, served in more than 5,000 restaurants nationwide.

The initiative, according to Gu Lei, chief impact officer of McDonald’s China, “will continue to help protect the vitality of the ocean.” Gu described McDonald’s China as “actively building a sustainable supply chain to reduce damage to the environment through its seafood procurement.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Fishing ban may only be one step toward preventing king salmon, orca extinctions

July 25, 2023 — The king salmon population in Alaska has dropped 60% since 1984, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

A lawsuit aiming to curb the extinction of the salmon and orcas through limiting human consumption of the fish recently led to the shutdown of one of the largest fisheries in the world. The Wild Fish Conservancy, who filed the lawsuit, argued that the fate of orcas and king salmon were intertwined — the fish, known for their size and high fat content, are the whales’ preferred meal — and human consumption leaves little of the food source for the 73 remaining resident orcas off the coast of Seattle.

Now, some say halting the fishing of king salmon, also known as Chinook salmon, is only the start of preventing the species’ extinction. The other factor? Climate change.

Regardless whether king salmon are at risk of extinction because of human fishing or climate change, Corby Kummer, executive director of the Food and Society Policy program at the Aspen Institute, told Boston Public Radio the takeaway is the same: “We shouldn’t be catching and eating king salmon, period.”

Read the full article GBH

ALASKA: Alaska salmon fishers fume over low prices, but processors say they’re hurting too

July 23, 2023 — A few times this summer, Jared Danielson, who fishes for salmon on the Alaska Peninsula, found himself fighting back tears in his bunk.

Aboard the F/V Five Star, his boat, Danielson and his deckhand put away as many pounds of fish as they could. They had no breakdowns. But his seafood processor is paying him 70 cents a pound for his salmon — half of last year’s price  — which means that instead of his usual six-figure haul for a summer of hard work, he might only break even, or go home to his family in Washington with $10,000, if he’s lucky.

“I’ve done everything right,” Danielson, 36, said in an interview this week. “It’s pretty demoralizing — you take all this risk, all this sacrifice, and you go home essentially without a paycheck.”

He added: “We’re up against something that’s out of our control, and that’s the processors killing us here.”

In the past few weeks, thousands of fishermen across the state have found themselves in a similar predicament: The price they’ll be paid by the processing companies that buy their salmon won’t be enough to cover their costs — or, at least, will make them far less profit than last year.

Read the full article at Alaska Beacon