Saving Seafood

Financial outlook sunny for salmon fishermen, plus commercial salmon openers around Alaska

May 29, 2018 — Forces are aligned for a nice payday 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 in nearby British Columbia.

“About every four years we expect a relatively large harvest from the Fraser River run in B.C. In 2014 they produced about 83 million pounds of salmon and sockeye was the largest component,” Evridge said. “Likewise, a weaker dollar will make wild salmon imports from Russia and Japan more expensive for U.S. buyers.”

Russia, which had grown from a $10 million customer of primarily pink salmon roe to $60 million in 2013, has banned all imports of U.S. seafood since 2014. Meanwhile, that country continues to send millions of tons of salmon and other seafood into the U.S.

Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News

 

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’s seafood marketing agency expands its reach

December 1, 2017 — On a domestic and international scale, the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute expanded its reach over the past year to promote domestic and overseas sales of wild Alaska seafood, and educate the industry on seafood technical issues.

In presentations Nov. 28, at the start of ASMI’s three-day All Hands meeting in Anchorage, some 200 participants heard progress reports on these and other related issues, including ASMI’s sustainability program.

Fisheries market researcher Andy Wick, presenting for the McDowell Group in Juneau, noted that the cumulative first wholesale value of wild Alaska seafood from 1959 through 2016 totaled $170 billion, equal to the value of all major professional sports teams in North America.

Eighty percent of the state’s commercial seafood harvests from 2011 through 2015 was in high volume groundfish, including Pollock and cod, while salmon garnered on average 15 percent of the catch, halibut and black cod 1 percent, and crab 1 percent.

Read the full story at the Cordova Times

 

Calculating the value of Alaska seafood

October 26, 2017 — Alaska has produced more than 169 billion pounds of fish since statehood was granted to the Last Frontier in 1959, and the Alaskan seafood industry brings in enough product annually to feed every person in the world a serving of Alaskan seafood.

These and other statistics relating to the seafood industry in the state can be found in “The Economic Value of Alaska’s Seafood Industry,” a joint report by The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) and the McDowell Group, a research and consulting firm, which details the impact of Alaska’s seafood economy. This is the second collaboration over the past two years between the groups.

The report is meant to provide statistics and figures on employment in the industry, labor income, seafood value, exports, and other related subjects. From fun facts (Alaska’s commercial fishing fleet is comprised of about 9,400 boats, which would measure 70 miles if they were lined up from bow to stern in a straight line) to precise tax numbers, the report is a gold mine of research about the Alaskan seafood industry.

The report reveals that in 2016, Alaska’s seafood harvest of 5.6 billion pounds had a total value of USD 1.7 billion (EUR 1.4 billion). Processors in Alaska produced 2.7 billion pounds of Alaska seafood products last year, valued at USD 4.2 billion (EUR 3.6 billion). The overall impact of Alaska’s seafood industry on the U.S. economy is USD 5.4 billion (EUR 4.6 billion) in direct output – that’s value that can be directly associated with fishing, processing, distribution, and retail. Such a figure doesn’t include USD 7.3 billion (EUR 6.2 billion) in additional multiplier effects generated as industry income circulates throughout the U.S. economy, the report said.

Read the full story at Seafood Source 

 

A closer look at the value of Alaska’s seafood industry

October 23, 2017 — Alaska’s fishing fleet of 9,400 vessels would span nearly 71 miles if lined up from bow to stern.

And Alaska’s fishing industry catches and processes enough seafood each year to feed every person on the planet one serving, or a serving for each American every day for more than a month.

Those are just a few of the fish facts highlighted in the annual “Economic Value of Alaska’s Seafood Industry” report compiled by the McDowell Group for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.

The report breaks down the numbers of fishermen, processors, species caught, values and more by region.

Read the full story at Alaska Dispatch News

Group releases study on fishing, tourism dollars from Southeast Alaska rivers

November 23, 2016 — Three major rivers that flow out of Canada into Southeast Alaska could provide a combined $1 billion in value for tourism and fisheries on this side of the border over the next three decades.

That’s one findings in a new study commissioned by a group seeking to highlight potential impacts to those rivers from the mining industry in British Columbia.

The study puts some numbers to the arguments that Southeast Alaska fishermen, tour operators, tribal leaders and communities have been making about the importance of the Taku River near Juneau, Stikine near Wrangell and the Unuk north of Ketchikan.

Salmon Beyond Borders commissioned the report, written by the McDowell Group.

Commercial and sport fishing activity along with tourism dollars from the waterways are worth a combined $48 million a year in economic activity including the paychecks for 400 people in Southeast, the study said.

“It’s well known to any of us who live in Southeast Alaska know that salmon and commercial fishing have a substantial impact on our region’s economy and that the visitor industry as well,” said Kirsten Shelton-Walker, project manager with the research and consulting business McDowell Group in Juneau. “And so, we were not surprised but it was interesting to find that the impact of these rivers could be as high as almost $1 billion over a 30-year horizon.”

Read the full story at KTOO

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