Dire condition of Alaska’s seafood industry has many causes and no easy fixes, experts say

State officials and industry leaders trying to rescue the ailing Alaska seafood industry are facing daunting challenges, recently released numbers show.

The industry lost $1.8 billion last year, the result of low prices, closed harvests and other problems, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Direct employment of harvesters last year fell by 8% to the lowest level since 2001, when counts of harvesting jobs began, the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development said. The monthly average for seafood-harvesting jobs fell below 5,900 in 2023, down from a peak of about 8,500 in 2015, according to a newly published analysis in Alaska Economic Trends, the department’s monthly research magazine.

Local ownership of fishing permits has eroded over several years. In the Bristol Bay salmon fishery, for example, from 1975 to 2023, locally owned setnet permits declined in number by 54% and locally owned driftnet permits declined by 59%, according to experts at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and elsewhere.

State Rep. Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham, part of a task force charged with making recommendations on ways that lawmakers can help rescue the industry, said the solutions will be difficult and will require the full attention of his colleagues next year.

“I think this next session is an opportunity for us to really take that sort of hard look at the industry — where it is today where it could be tomorrow, where it may not be if we don’t take action,” Edgmon said on Thursday, the second of two days of hearings held last week in Anchorage by the Joint Legislative Task Force Evaluating Alaska’s Seafood Industry.

The task force is due to produce a report, with recommendations for action, at the start of the 2025 legislative session.

Myriad causes and a ‘perfect storm’

As described by experts who testified at the task force’s most recent hearings, the causes of the crisis hitting nearly all sectors of Alaska’s seafood industry are myriad.

One is climate change. The stock crashes that prompted the cancellation of recent and formerly lucrative Bering Sea crab fisheries, for example, have been blamed by scientists on a marine heat wave, part of a series of heat waves connected to climate change.

There is no question that climate change is impacting the fish in the ocean environment, said Florence Kargi, regional affairs manager at the Coastal Villages Region Fund, a Western Alaska regional organization that holds Bering Sea harvest shares through the federal Community Development Quota program.

“We see it. Every year. This time of year in the ‘90s, when I was growing up, the ocean would be frozen” and winter conditions would have swept in, Kargi, who is from the Yup’ik village of Hooper Bay, told legislators on Thursday. “But now we’re in mid-November, and the ocean isn’t frozen.”

There are plenty of other causes of the economic turmoil, however.

Joe Bundrant, chief executive officer of Trident Seafoods, described how Russian fish production is part of a “perfect storm” of low prices, devaluation of Alaska’s product and a geopolitical landscape “like I’ve never seen anything close to it.”

In a panel discussion at last week’s Resource Development Council for Alaska annual conference in Anchorage, Bundrant pointed to the recently announced Russian decision to increase its allowable catch of pollock by 7% to 2.46 million metric tons. The Russian quota decision ran counter to advice from some scientists and pleas from some Russian fishing groups worried about low prices in a glutted market.

The 2025 Russian quota compares to a total allowable catch of pollock for 2024 on the U.S. side of the Bering Sea of 1.3 million metric tons.

“This hurts me to even say,” Bundrant told the conference audience. “When the fish swims across the dateline, it’s harvested, it’s sold around the world as Alaska pollock. That is the species’ name. So even though we can put together a great marketing campaign in South America, we put together a great marketing campaign in Germany or Japan, the Russians come in and say, ‘Well, we have Alaska pollock too. It’s just cheaper.’”

Alaska Department of Fish and Game Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang, speaking at the RDC conference, said booming supplies of salmon from new sources are among the many headwinds the Alaska seafood industry faces.

That includes increasing hatchery releases from Asia that are crowding the ocean that Alaska fish use, he said. And it includes pen-reared salmon, he said.

“We’re seeing increased fish farming worldwide,” Vincent-Lang said. “That’s having an impact on our wild salmon and our ability to sell those wild fish.”

Farmed salmon is produced not only in cold-water places like Norway and Chile but also in some less-likely locations, now including Florida.

Luke Fanning, head of a nonprofit that supports fishery development and participates in Community Development Quota harvests in the Aleutian-Pribilof region, cited aged infrastructure as another challenge.

“So much of the Alaska seafood infrastructure was built in the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s all getting old. At the same time, we need to have the retained earnings, we need to have the support, we need to have the capital investment to continue to make those investments to revitalize the industry or we’re going to lose all those community benefits,” Fanning, who is chief executive office of the Aleutian Pribilof Island Community Development Association, told the RDC audience.

Five seafood plants have closed in the past four years, dealing devastating blows to those communities, Fanning said.

A modernization in the works?

There was some consensus among speakers at the two-day task force hearing, as well as panel speakers at the RDC conference, about certain solutions.

They want more rigorous fishery and environmental science and the funding it would require.

They want continued and enhanced federal trade policies to counter what they say are unfair practices by Russia and other players. Last year’s executive order barring imports of Russian fish processed in other countries is an example of desired trade policies, Bundrant said.

Legislative task force members have zeroed in on the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, an industry-funded state agency, as critical to any solution.

Senate President Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak, the chair of the task force, noted that lawmakers approved increased funding for ASMI last year, but that Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed the increase.

“I think it’ll be added back into the budget this coming session,” Stevens said during the second day of last week’s hearing. “We realize how important it is that marketing is an important issue.”

ASMI’s role in fixing the industry problems may require more than funding, some task force members suggested. There could be a need for restructuring the agency or expanding its authority, they said.

The task force heard ideas about investment projects and technological innovations, like an energy-efficient, at-sea fast-freeze system used by fishers in Iceland.

Kristy Clement, chief executive officer of the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation, made a presentation on Wednesday that the nonprofit organization’s ongoing initiative for top-to-bottom modernization of the industry. The initiative was launched at an AFDF board meeting last February, she said.

The first task is better data collection, which has already started, Clement said. The foundation has contracted with McKinley Research for a detailed seafood processor business model and cost analysis, which is expected to be completed early next year, she said.

Other elements of the initiative include new product development and enhanced marketing. To that end, the foundation has expanded its Alaska Symphony of Seafood event to give it a more global focus, she said. The event showcases new products and menu items made with Alaska seafood, with awards given to winning entries. This year, a Symphony of Seafood event was held in February in Juneau, but an encore event is scheduled for Tuesday in Seattle.

The initiative also has a workforce development component — targeting processors as well as harvesters — and a technology innovation component, Clement told lawmakers.

“Our expected outcomes are really to increase efficiencies across the board, to streamline operations, to reduce waste and to ultimately be able to achieve higher yields and profitability for harvesters and processors,” she said.

Task force members said their own work is unlikely to be done when the group finishes its recommendation report at the start of the 2025 legislation session.

One member, Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer, floated the idea of another bill to create a two-year task force.

While the current task force was created to produce some quick and immediate legislative responses, it may take more time to address the broader problems, Vance said at the close of Thursday’s testimony.

“I think all of us are in agreement that we’re going to have to make a significant change in how we are doing our fisheries. Because we have communities that are in peril,” she said.

Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.