Saving Seafood

Alaska halibut getting battered by foreign imports

May 12, 2020 — Sales of Alaska’s most popular seafoods are being hit hard by markets upended by the coronavirus, but perhaps none is getting battered worse than halibut. Along with the big losses in the lucrative restaurant trade, Pacific halibut also is facing headwinds from increasing foreign imports.

Starting three years ago, sales of fresh Pacific halibut to established markets on the East Coast were toppled by a flood of less expensive fish flowing in primarily from eastern Canada. Trade data show that for 2019 through February 2020, total Canadian halibut imports to the U.S. topped 15.3 million pounds for which the U.S. paid nearly $107 million.

“It is taking over the eastern seaboard and also is being trucked from Boston to major middle American markets such as Chicago and Denver. It’s very hard to sell Alaska halibut to these traditional markets now. The Canadian product is cheaper and is available nearly year round,” said a marketer with more than 30 years of experience in selling halibut from Southeast Alaska, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“All of a sudden, an important market that paid a good price for fresh halibut has disappeared,” he said. “Rule of thumb is generally, sell fresh make a profit, freeze halibut, lose money.”

Earlier this year, fresh farmed Atlantic halibut was spotted for sale at $9.99 per pound at a Costco near Seattle.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

Northern Lights: The national seafood nexus

February 6, 2020 — For more than 30 years, Alaska has been the nation’s largest producer of seafood by volume and value. This status continues into a fourth decade, detailed in a recently published report commissioned by the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. Focused on the 2017-18 period, the report describes the broad economic impact of the state’s seafood industry on a regional, statewide and national level, in addition to details about global competition, tax revenue generated by the industry, and other special topics.

Over the study period, an estimated 58,700 workers were directly employed annually in the industry with wages totaling $1.7 billion. Approximately 29,400 commercial fishermen participated in Alaska’s fisheries aboard more than 9,000 vessels ranging from small skiffs to large catcher-processors. Trawl, pot, longline, gillnet and seine gear types are the primary harvest methods in Alaska’s fisheries. About 26,000 processing workers were employed across Alaska in 166 shoreside facilities, with other processors active on vessels that harvest and process their catch. About 3,300 individuals worked at salmon hatcheries, managed fisheries, marketed seafood and provided other support services.

In addition to direct employment, additional impacts occur when industry participants purchase goods or services. For example, the welder repairing a gillnet vessel or the truck driver delivering fuel to a processing plant are indirectly supported by the industry. The seafood sector is also credited with impacts associated with local government services supported by seafood-related taxes or purchases in retail stores by processing workers, for example. Including all economic impacts, 37,700 full-time equivalent jobs, $2.1 billion in wages, and $5.6 billion in economic output (a measurement that captures all economic activity) is supported by the industry in Alaska.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Breaking down Alaska seafood’s economic value

January 29, 2020 — Which Alaska region is home to the most fishing boats, and where do most of Alaska’s fishermen live?

Answers to those questions and many others can be found in the annual report Economic Value of Alaska’s Seafood Industry 2020 by the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. The report, prepared by the McDowell Group, gives a fishing snapshot by Alaska region, including employment rates and tax revenues, and breaks down the industry’s impacts to the nation and the world.

Here are some highlights:

The seafood industry contributed $5.6 billion in economic output to Alaska’s economy in 2017/2018, including harvesting, processing, and support sectors.

About 58,700 workers were directly employed by Alaska’s seafood industry, earning $1.7 billion in wages annually.

There were 29,400 skippers, active permit owners and crew who fished in Alaska, of which 16,319 (56%) were Alaska residents.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

Alaska fishermen seek solutions as they grapple with the destructive appetites of sea otters

October 30, 2019 — They may be cute, but the voracious appetites of sea otters continue to cause significant damage to some of Southeast Alaska’s most lucrative fisheries.

How best to curtail those impacts will be the focus of a day long stakeholders meeting set for Nov. 6 in Juneau.

“All of the people who have anything to do with the otters hopefully will all be in the same room at the same time,” said Phil Doherty, co-director of the Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Fisheries Association based in Ketchikan.

A 2011 report by the McDowell Group showed that otter predation on sea cucumbers, clams, urchins, crabs and other shellfish cost the Southeast economy nearly $30 million over 15 years. And their population has skyrocketed since then.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Season of uncertainty: Alaska braces for seafood tariffs

June 14, 2019 — Fisheries are always fraught with uncertainties, but there is an added element this year: trade tariffs on Alaska’s largest export: seafood. “The industry is accustomed to dealing with uncertainty about harvest levels, prices and currency rates. The trade disputes just add another layer to that,” said Garrett Evridge, an economist with the McDowell Group.

Tariffs of up to 25 percent on U.S. seafood products going to China went into effect last July and more are being threatened now by the Trump administration. China is Alaska’s biggest seafood buyer purchasing 54 percent of Alaska seafood exports in 2017 valued at $1.3 billion.

“It’s important to remember that a tariff is simply a tax and it increases the prices of our products,” Evridge explained. “As Alaskans we are sensitive to any increase in the price of our seafood because we are competing on a global stage. And right now we have tariffs imposed on seafood from the Chinese side and the U.S. side.”

In terms of Alaska salmon, the new taxes could hit buyers of pinks and chums especially hard. Managers expect huge runs of both this summer and much of the pack will be processed into various products in China and then returned to the United States.

“There is uncertainty as to whether or not those products will be tariffed and the Trump administration has indicated they want to tariff all products from China,” Evridge said.

For salmon, in a typical year Alaska contributes 30 to 50 percent of the world’s wild harvest. But when you include farmed salmon, Evridge said, Alaska’s contribution is closer to 15 percent of the global salmon supply.

The Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game is predicting a total catch of 213.2 million salmon this year, more than 80 percent higher than in 2018.

Read the full story at National Fisherman

Alaska’s seafood industry by the numbers, plus fish skin’s medical applications and antibiotics in Chilean salmon

May 1, 2019 — Why should every Alaskan budget watcher care about the price of fish?

Because when the price at the docks goes up by just one penny, it means more money for state coffers.

In 2017, for example, the average dock price per pound for all Alaska seafood was 41 cents. If the price had increased to 42 cents, it would have added nearly $2 million more from fisheries landing and business taxes.

That was one of the takeaways in an updated McDowell Group report presented last week at the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute’s spring board meeting. It offers a good snapshot of the industry that spawned Alaska statehood and is now a seafood superpower.

Read the full story at Anchorage Daily News

Alaska’s Seafood Industry Faces the Blob

November 5, 2018 — Challenging statewide salmon harvests have dominated head­lines, with record-high sockeye production in Bristol Bay being the state’s primary saving grace. However, salmon are not the only fish in the sea keeping the state’s fisheries afloat, with many fishermen relying on groundfish, herring, and miscellaneous shellfish to make ends meet. Some fishermen use alternative fisheries as a way to balance their portfolios, while others focus entirely on a single target species ranging from Dungeness crab to sablefish. “In a typical year, Alaska’s most valuable fisheries [measured by value of harvest] include salmon, pollock, Pacific cod, crab, halibut, and black cod,” says Garrett Evridge, an economist with McDowell Group, an Alaska-based research firm.

In 2017, salmon was the most valuable fish group. Harvest of all five salmon species totaled more than $781 million in ex-vessel value, the amount paid to fishermen for their catch. However, Evridge notes that 2018 has been a disappointing year for many salmon fisheries, a statewide concern.

“Salmon across the state have come in weaker than forecast, particularly in the North Gulf of Alaska,” says Bert Lewis, the Central Region supervisor of the Division of Commercial Fisheries for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG). “In the region I work, we saw some of the lowest returns of sockeye salmon in recent history with the exception of Bristol Bay, where we had the biggest run on record.”

The sockeye salmon harvest is estimated to be 37 percent of the recent ten-year average, making it the smallest since 1975—all other smaller harvests date back to the 1800s.

The “blob”—a warm water anomaly that washed into the Gulf of Alaska in 2015—is thought to be the culprit. With most sockeye salmon spending three years in the ocean, those returning this year initially swam out into warmer waters, which researchers speculate disrupted the food webs that support the salmon, decreasing their survivorship and resulting in poor returns this year.

“That concept is supported by the record return we saw in Bristol Bay, with close to 65 million sockeye returning that, in 2015, came out into the Bering Sea, which did not have this warm-water anomaly,” Lewis says.

However, poor harvests weren’t limited to sockeye: Chinook, chum, and pink numbers all came in low.

“In the Southeast, total salmon harvest will be about 30 percent of the recent ten-year average, due primarily to poor pink salmon run, since pink salmon usually make up most of the harvest,” says Steve Heinl, a regional research biologist for ADFG in Southeast.

“Pink salmon harvest is 19 percent of the recent ten-year average and the smallest since 1976,” Heinl says. “Pink harvest will be less than half of the harvest in 2016 [18.4 million fish], which spurred a formal declaration of disaster.”

Levels are well below ADFG’s forecast of 23 million pink salmon, though only slightly below the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast of 10 million to 23 million.

As of late August, chum salmon harvest to date was 69 percent of the recent ten-year average; Chinook harvest was at 30 percent of recent ten-year average; and coho harvest was on track to be lowest in thirty years, says Heinl.

Though state numbers are low, harvest success varied dramatically among systems. In Southeast, there were excellent Sockeye runs at Chilkoot Lake and Redoubt Lake, which stood in stark contrast to poor runs in places such as Situk River, where the fishery was closed for most of the season.

Read the full story at Alaska Business

 

Tariffs set to take toll on Alaska seafood exports and imports

August 30, 2018 — More seafood tariffs in Trump’s trade war with China are hitting Alaska coming and going.

On July 6, the first 25 percent tax went into effect on more than 170 U.S. seafood products going to China. On Aug. 23 more items were added to the list, including fishmeal from Alaska.

“As of right now, nearly every species and product from Alaska is on that list of tariffs,” said Garrett Evridge, a fisheries economist with the McDowell Group.

Alaska produces more than 70,000 metric tons of fishmeal per year (about 155 million pounds), mostly from pollock trimmings, with salmon a distant second. The pollock meal is used primarily in Chinese aquaculture production, while salmon meal goes mostly to pet food makers in the U.S.

In 2017 about $70 million worth of fishmeal from Alaska pollock was exported to China from processing plants all over the state.

Read the full story at the Alaska Journal of Commerce

U.S. Seafood Industry Vulnerable to Tariffs Aimed at China

August 9, 2018 — The next round of U.S. tariffs aimed at Chinese imports could wind up hurting a major product that initially comes from America: fish.

Proposed 10% duties by the Trump administration last month on $200 billion worth of imports from China included dozens of varieties of fish, from tilapia to tuna. The proposed tariffs, which could increase to 25%, are set to be decided in September by trade representatives.

An estimated $900 million worth of fish and seafood on that list is first caught in the U.S., sent to China for processing into items like fish sticks and fillets, and then imported by U.S. companies to sell to American consumers.

“The value added is in another country, but essentially it’s an American-raised product,” Joseph Glauber, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said of goods like fish sourced in the U.S. that are processed overseas and re-imported. He said the proposed tariffs could cut profits or boost prices throughout seafood supply chains, from fishermen to consumers.

The practice of sending fish to China to be breaded, seasoned, portioned or packaged has grown in the past two decades, according to U.S. fishing groups. Domestic seafood-processing plants have faced high costs and labor shortages, while cheaper facilities have sprung up in China to support its extensive domestic fish-farming industry.

That has helped make China the top source of seafood to the U.S., with the 1.3 billion pounds sent to the U.S. last year double that of second-ranked India, according to market-research firm Urner Barry.

The exposure of U.S. seafood to tariffs aimed at another country highlights how intertwined global supply chains have become. Many pink salmon, for example, are caught by commercial fishermen in southeast Alaska. The fish are transported to processing plants to be headed, gutted and frozen, before being loaded into shipping containers bound for China. Once there, they are thawed, deboned, smoked, filleted or turned into salmon burgers for sale world-wide, including to the U.S.

More than half of Alaskan seafood sent to China is processed and then re-exported, said Garrett Evridge, an economist with McDowell Group, an Alaskan research and consulting firm. The percentage can be as high as 95% for fish like sole, he said. The fishing industry, one of the largest private-sector employers in Alaska, provides about 60,000 jobs, he said, and Alaskan seafood makes up 60% of the nation’s catch.

Some Gulf Coast seafood producers had lobbied for the latest round of tariffs to include fish. In a letter to the Trump administration in May, the Southern Shrimp Alliance trade group said that Chinese-farmed fish tend to be raised with antibiotics, and imports unfairly compete with the group’s members.

Read the full story at The Wall Street Journal

Alaska salmon exports should fetch high prices this year

May 30, 2018 — Forces are aligned for a nice pay day for Alaska’s salmon fishermen.

There is no backlog from last season in cold storages, a lower harvest forecast is boosting demand, prices for competing farmed salmon have remained high all year and a devalued U.S. dollar makes Alaska salmon more appealing to foreign customers.

“Over the past year the dollar has weakened 11 percent against the euro, 9 percent against the British pound, 5 percent against the Japanese yen, and 7 percent against the Chinese yuan. That makes Alaska salmon and other seafood more affordable to those top overseas customers,” said Garrett Evridge, a fisheries analyst at the McDowell Group.

Last year, Alaska seafood exports set records in terms of volume and value — 1.1 billion metric tons valued at $3.45 billion. Alaska salmon accounted for 22 percent of the volume and 36 percent of the value.

On the home front, the weaker dollar will make imports from Chile, the largest farmed salmon importer to the U.S. followed by Norway, more expensive. That also will apply to imports of competing wild salmon from Canada where — if it materializes — a big sockeye run is predicted at nearby British Columbia.

Read the full story at National Fisherman