May 18, 2021 — The highly anticipated Copper River salmon season, which opens Tuesday, 18 May, has chefs, seafood retailers, and consumers paying top-dollar for the first fish to be caught and sent to the mainland United States from Alaska.
Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.-based OBI Seafoods opted to donate some of its first fish to the Seattle nonprofit We Got This Seattle, which supports frontline workers and Seattle restaurants.
March 30, 2021 — An executive with the international organization responsible for the Dolphin Safe tuna label is charging that the producers of the new Netflix documentary “Seaspiracy” took his comments out of context to suggest dolphins are being slaughtered by tuna fishing operations.
Mark Palmer, associate director USA, for the International Marine Mammal Project (IMMP), which is operated by the Earth Island Institute, said he provided the documentary’s film crew with “extensive information on how the Dolphin Safe label is used for the protection of dolphins.”
None of this information was used in the documentary, he said in a post on the group’s website.
Palmer, in one of the more memorable scenes from the film, was asked if his group could guarantee that no dolphins were ever killed in any tuna fishery anywhere in the world.
December 9, 2020 — A lack of fish in the freezers is an encouraging sign for Alaska salmon as we head into the new year, driven by increasing customer demand. But headwinds from trade disputes and the COVID pandemic also loom large on the 2021 horizon.
Those are some prime takeaways shared by Mark Palmer, president and CEO of OBI Seafoods, and Allen Kimball, vice president of global operations and sales for Trident Seafoods.
“We don’t see entering the 2021 season with any real big carryovers. And that’s always one of the downsides as we head into a new season, if there’s an abundance of two to four (pound) sockeyes or something. We’ve gone into seasons like that and it influences the new season pricing. But as we go into 2021, we should have a pretty clean slate and be ready to buy and ideally put it up in a better product form than we did this last year,” said Palmer, speaking at a webinar hosted by United Fishermen of Alaska.
The COVID pandemic this year forced a shift from workers producing fresh salmon fillets to lower value canned and frozen fish when the labor force was reduced and costly restrictions were imposed on processing lines.