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The View From The Storm
The legislative task force looking at Alaska’s commercial fishing industry met in September. The tangle of problems facing our neighbors who make a living on fish makes a bad backlash on a bait reel look like a game of cat’s cradle.
We spent two days listening to economists and marketers and fish managers, along with some scientists. There are short-term crises of too much product on shelves and in freezers. Some processors have unpaid bills to fishermen and high-interest loans to pay. Consumers are feeling pinched at the grocery store after a couple years of inflation, making sales sluggish.
Those issues benefit most from short-term financial help to bridge the gaps. The task force will work on ideas to introduce this session. But there are still more issues on the horizon. Looking a little further down the road, I think I see four major areas that will need our focus: who is catching fish, who is buying fish, who else is selling fish, and what it all costs.
Nearly 50,000 sets of hands make a buck harvesting seafood in Alaska annually. With each passing year, fewer of them are Alaska residents. And the proportion of gray hair keeps rising. We'll need to bend our thoughts to how we keep Alaskans in the business, and attract more young folks.
The conversation about buyers doesn’t just mean whether a boat sells its catch to Alaska Glacier Seafood or Haines Packing Co. Bankruptcies and consolidations among processors are definitely a bad sign, but don’t have to be the end of the world as long as Alaska still has competition in the industry. One perennial goal should be to do as much processing here in Alaska as we can. Not only does it keep jobs and economic activity in state, it adds resilience. Local plants are tough to disrupt with a trade dispute (or, Heaven forbid, another war).
But there’s an even bigger buyer question: who are our consumers? Much has been done to diversify the market for Alaska fish, but most of it still gets eaten in just a few parts of the world. Uncle Sam helps some with international marketing, but generally won’t let us use federal money to advertise in the Lower 48. (That makes sense when you imagine the Congressional fight that would erupt if we used New Englanders’ dollars to tell Midwesterners that Alaska cod taste better than Atlantic cod.)
So the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute uses Alaskans’ money to advertise in the USA. We’ve already missed a big opportunity there. The feds finally closed the loophole that let Russia skirt international sanctions and sell fish to Americans. That left a hole in restaurant and grocery supply chains, so this year the legislature put $10 million in ASMI’s budget to fill it with as much Alaska seafood as possible. The governor vetoed the money, saying if it was really needed, he’d consider a supplemental this coming session. But a supplemental appropriation in April or May doesn’t let ASMI sell this winter—when Norway and Chile will be spending big to put their farmed fish in those places instead.
That brings us to the question of who else is selling seafood. Salmon farmers are now an old competitor. Their product is softer and less flavorful, but it’s cheaper and they can deliver it fresh year-round. That’s a fight Alaska seafood knows how to fight. What’s new is the quantity of white fishes that are farmed, largely in fresh water, and sold very, very cheaply. Tilapia, catfish, and carp are being grown all over the world in rapidly increasing quantities.
That gets in the way of selling Alaska seafood for enough to cover the cost of catching, processing, and moving it to market. We are in many ways at the mercy of global markets. Sure, Alaska produces 60% of America’s 4.2 million tons of seafood caught each year, but the rest of the world catches about 85 million tons. And they farm another 80 million or so on top of that.
That suggests maybe wild Alaska seafood is headed for luxury product status. Certainly today less salmon is going in cans compared to filet portions than it used to, and more crab is shipped live to consumers, bringing in top dollar. But a huge portion is still trying to compete with other cheap protein. We need to evaluate whether that economic model’s days are numbered. If so, the critical question will be how we sell pink salmon and pollock as something more valuable than salmon burgers and fish sticks. In a country where chicken thighs get marked down to $4.50/lb, that won’t be easy.
That’s why we spent the latter half of our Seafood Task Force meeting discussing where we’d like to find our solutions. There are many different routes to go, and over the next four months we’ll explore as many of them as we can.
There's a fifth issue that's mostly beyond the reach of the state legislature: the ocean itself. As long as we keep strong protections for spawning and rearing habitat, the strength of our fish runs will depend mostly on a healthy Pacific. With rising global temperatures and the water getting more acidic, that health isn’t a given. Alaska alone can't solve global problems of climate change and ocean acidification, but neither can we afford to do nothing.
But that’s what the task force is about: making sure we do what’s needed to get an iconic Alaska industry through today’s crisis and help position it for success into the future. If you have thoughts on any or all of the solutions please drop me a line. I’d love to hear from you!
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