Saving Seafood

ALASKA: Siding with the mine: Bristol Bay fishermen team up with Pebble

April 10, 2019 — A group of Bristol Bay fishermen has filed suit to stop the region’s seafood marketing group from spending funds that they say are aimed at fighting the development of Pebble Mine. The mine’s developer is footing the bill for the lawsuit.

Gary Nielsen, Trefim Andrew, Tim Anelon, Henry Olympic, and Abe and Braden Williams claim the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association is using $250,000 on efforts to stop the mine. That money is earmarked for marketing local fish, and is being “unlawfully spent,” they say.

“The mine presents a significant threat to this fishery’s bright future, especially if the process is going to omit rigorous scientific analysis and ignore the inconvenient concerns of downstream stakeholders,” said Andy Wink, the association’s executive director.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

US, China are drivers of push for more salmon production

January 18, 2019 — Demand for salmon continues to be strong globally, but the dual markets of the United States and China have salmon sellers licking their lips at the massive opportunity they represent.

Salmon’s position as a healthy staple is driving interest in the species worldwide, but the low rates of per capita consumption in the U.S. and China show that there’s still plenty of room to grow the markets in both countries, a panel of salmon experts speaking on Wednesday, 16 January at the Global Seafood Market Conference in Coronado, California, U.S.A., agreed.

Natural limits in production from wild-catch salmon fisheries, and more complicated set of restrictions on farmed salmon production, means much of that demand likely won’t be met anytime soon. As a result, prices for salmon are rising. The average price of a pound of salmon in September 2015 was USD 4.12 (EUR 3.62) in 2015 and three years later, in September 2018, the price had risen to USD 5.80. (EUR 5.09).

“That’s the outcome of that gap between supply and demand,” Andy Wink, the executive director of the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association, said.

Wink is especially bullish on the potential for the United States to become a bigger consumer of salmon, even though it already represents the largest salmon market in the world.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Keep your cool: Bristol Bay touts new ice totes at PME

November 20, 2018 — Quality is king these days in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Well, so is quantity, especially after the bay tallied its biggest run in 125 years this season. But back to the quality thing. The Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association has spearheaded a push for colder, less traumatized fish, working with fishermen, processors and buyers to get more and better fillets to consumers around the world. And it all starts with keeping fish cold from the moment they come out of the water.

“Chilling fish is about storing value, because you increase shelf life, and there’s a definite mathematical relationship between the value of the fish and how much shelf life it has once it’s processed. That all starts on the grounds with the chilling, and it goes right down the chain of custody into retail,” said Mike Ficcero, BBRSDA’s board president.

To that end, BBRSDA was at Pacific Marine Expo in Seattle this week, promoting new ice totes they hope will allow them to get more and better ice to Bristol Bay’s fleet, especially in remote districts on the east side of the bay like Egegik.

“We knew we needed to get more ice around the bay. It’s so important, a lot of boats take it, and chilling is critical the quality of the fish. Ice obviously melts on the tenders, and these insulated bags will allow us to have more efficient ice delivery,” said Andy Wink, the new executive director at BBRSDA.

Cameo Padilla, BBRSDA’s program manager, worked with Seattle Tarp and others to make the first bags, which will be rolled out in 2019.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

 

Seafood industry seeks new value in fish parts

January 15, 2018 — State seafood marketers are rebranding fish parts as “specialty” products and mapping a path for millions more dollars in sales.

Alaska’s fisheries produce more than 5 billion pounds of seafood each year. When all the fish is headed and gutted or filleted and all the crab legs are clustered, it leaves about 3 billion pounds of trimmings. Some is turned into meal and oil, but for the most part, the “gurry” is ground up and discharged into local waterways.

“Whether that’s heads or guts, milt, or meal or oil or something else, it should be held in high regard,” said Andy Wink, a seafood economist formerly with the McDowell Group. “These are products that are out of our normal range but they are specialty items serving niche markets.”

A new Analyses of Specialty Alaska Seafood Products report compiled for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute takes a look at uses for fish heads, oil, meal, internal organs, crab products, roe, herring fillets, arrowtooth flounder, spiny dogfish and skates.

It makes the point that Alaska’s combined seafood catches, valued at roughly $2 billion at the docks and twice that when processors sell to their buyers, could be worth an additional $700 million or more if so called “specialty” products were added to the mix.

Take fish heads, for example. Alaska produces about 1 billion pounds of fish heads per year, which likely account for most of the processing waste, the report said. Just 1 percent is sold as frozen heads, although a single large salmon head can fetch up to $5 a pound at Beijing supermarkets, according to previous reports. Increasing the frozen market alone could add $100 million to processors’ sales, the report said.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

ALASKA: Sockeyes are silver lining in an otherwise miserable year for Alaska salmon

August 22, 2016 — Alaska’s 2016 pink salmon fishery is set to rank as the worst in 20 years by a long shot, and the outlook is bleak for other salmon except sockeyes, too.

“Boy, sockeye is really going to have to carry the load in terms of the fishery’s value because there’s a lot of misses elsewhere,” said Andy Wink, a fisheries economist with the Juneau-based McDowell Group.

The peaks of the various salmon runs have passed. The pink salmon catch so far has yet to break 35 million during a year when the forecast called for 90 million fish. Last year, 190 million were harvested.

Weekly tracking through Aug. 15 shows:

— The king salmon harvest (341,000) down 42 percent from last year in net fisheries (though the troll-caught catch is strong);

— Silvers (fewer than 2 million) down 20 percent;

— Chums (12 million) down 25 percent. “We’re probably looking at the second-worst harvest in the past 10 years,” Wink said.

Read the full story at the Alaska Dispatch News