Saving Seafood

For Alaska’s seafood processors, COVID-19 has cost tens of millions of dollars

October 2, 2020 — Seafood processors had a lot to deal with this season.

“Our biggest challenge in 2020 was safely staffing our plants,” said Julianne Curry, the public affairs manager for OBI Seafoods.

“It was a huge lift to get all employees tested, transported, quarantined, and fully integrated into each of our plants all while observing a closed campus and all COVID-related protocols and doing it all with very little time to plan and prepare for the summer salmon season,” she said.

To keep track of how the pandemic is shaping the seafood industry, economists at the McDowell Group have started to publish monthly briefs for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.

“It’s interesting to describe a crisis when you’re in the crisis, right? And that’s our situation,” said Garrett Everidge, an economist at the McDowell Group. “The goal is to try to keep up to speed on how the pandemic is impacting the seafood industry and really impacting all stakeholders, from local governments, supply chains, retailers, harvesters, processors.”

Read the full story at KTOO

Key Alaska seafood products dropped from list of Chinese tariffs

October 9, 2018 — Some of Alaska’s seafood industry has escaped the Trump administration’s trade war with China for now. The industry is happy the administration dropped some mainstay seafood products from a list of tariffs it imposed last week.

The Trump administration levied billions of dollars worth of tariffs on the world’s second largest economy on Sept. 24. The tariffs start at 10 percent and will ratchet up to 25 percent by 2019. The Trump administration’s original list of levies included seafood products that Alaska processors export to China for reprocessing.

“A portion of that actually comes back to the U.S.,” Garrett Everidge, a fisheries economist at the McDowell Group, said. “These would be products such as salmon products, Pacific cod products and other seafood products that the state produces.”

But Pacific cod and salmon have been dropped from the list.

“As of right now, those categories have been excluded from the import tariffs. Pollock products have also been excluded,” Everidge explained.

That’s good news. Even when those tariffs were just a proposal, they were slowing down Alaska processors’ sales in China, the main buyer of Alaska seafood.

That’s because Chinese fish buyers were taking a wait-and-see approach as the Trump administration worked to finalize its list of tariffs. 

“Compared to a few months ago when there was a bit more uncertainty and just less information, we now have a better understanding of those products that are actually going to be on the list,” Everidge added. “That represents an improvement for both the buyers and sellers.”

Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute Executive Director Alexa Tonkovich agrees the final list is an improvement.

Read the full story at Alaska Public Media