In Alaska, salmon is no longer king
By Dan Joling
Associated Press
KODIAK, Alaska — Since before the gold rush, Alaskans have made a living pulling fish from the water and shipping them off to feed the rest of the world.
Associated Press
And among all fish, salmon was king.
Tuck Bonney, a former production manager at a Cook Inlet fish-processing plant, is among the victims of the downturn in Alaska's fishing industry. His plant was bought out by a rival processor and then shut down this year.
Now Alaska's salmon fishing industry is in a steep downturn, pounded by the shifting global economy and hampered, some say, by Alaska's efforts to regulate the fishing industry so all of its fishermen can share the wealth.
Increased competition and plunging prices for salmon have kept fishing boats tied up at docks, closed processing plants and left workers without jobs. The consequences have rippled through the state's economy.
"What is at stake is the survival of a resource and an industry that is a fundamental foundation of our culture, our way of life and our economic prosperity," Gov. Tony Knowles said last month at a "fish summit" called to discuss the crisis.
Alaska's abundant fish have been a crucial part of its history. Eskimos relied on seafood to survive, and control of commercial fishing by absentee business interests during territorial days drove Alaskans to seek statehood.
By the early 1980s Alaska supplied nearly half the world's salmon. "People had to come to us to buy it," said Bob Thorstenson Jr., president of United Fishermen of Alaska, a trade association. "They lined up to buy it."
As recently as 2000, nearly one Alaskan in 12 made a living from commercial fishing — holding a fishing permit, a fishing crewman's license or a job in a processing plant.
But demand for salmon gave rise to "fish farms" where salmon are raised in pens. Abundant, cheaper farmed salmon proved to be tough competition for wild Alaska salmon. Two years ago, with farmed salmon firmly established in world markets, Alaska supplied just 19 percent of the global market. Last year's Alaska salmon harvest was worth about $220 million to fishermen, less than half the harvest's average value in the early 1990s.
A strong U.S. dollar; a long recession in Japan, the state's major overseas market; and the declining cost of other protein foods have also hurt profits and employment. Between 1995 and 2001, average monthly employment in seafood processing dropped from 10,400 jobs to 8,300.
The downturn has played out in such places as the Cook Inlet Processing fish-processing plant on Kodiak Island, at the edge of the Gulf of Alaska, about 250 miles south of Anchorage.
The plant was bought out by a rival processor and shut down last month, victim of a one-two punch: low salmon prices and restrictions on catching cod and pollock, the favorite food of the endangered Steller sea lion.
Unlike other plants that employ college students for seasonal work, Cook Inlet Processing provided nearly year-round jobs.
The plant marked its calendar by the fish that came in the door. From January through mid-March came gray cod, followed by rock sole, Dover sole and herring. Salmon season started in mid-June and lasted through September. Rock fish, pollock and more gray cod came through the door late in the year.
Working jobs such as the "slime line," using a spoon to clean fish carcasses of the blood that gutting machines miss, a husband and wife could earn $40,000 to $45,000 a year — enough to put down roots.
"They lived on the overtime," said production manager Tuck Bonney, sitting in the plant's empty lunchroom as a few workers trickled in to collect their final paychecks.
Caridad and Floro Rambac left $2-an-hour jobs in California to come to Alaska in 1975, and have worked in fish processing for most of the years since. They made enough to put their two children through Catholic school, but they still have eight years of payments left on their modest one-story home in a subdivision residents call the Aleutian homes, rows of prefabricated houses built for the Navy after World War II.
"We're going to try to find another cannery," Caridad said.
Cook Inlet Processing is the second plant on Kodiak Island to close in two years. Jobs at the remaining half-dozen plants are mostly filled, and Bonney estimates Kodiak can absorb 10 percent to 15 percent of the plant's laid-off workers.
"Most of them are going to have to leave town," he said.
Alaska is paying a price for a state-regulated fishing system that's inefficient by design. Salmon harvests are set up to spread profits among fishermen who use different techniques — those who fish from boats, for example, and those who stretch nets from shore. The state bans fish traps, restricts the size of fishing boats, and takes other measures to give more fishermen a piece of the action, without regard to efficiency or profitability.
"In effect, we give away our most important competitive advantage," said Gunnar Knapp, a University of Alaska-Anchorage economist.
So far, though, there's no plan for solving the fishing crisis. Suggestions include tariffs on imported farmed fish, price supports for American salmon, a flashy marketing campaign for Alaska salmon and buybacks of fishing boats or permits, leaving those who remain with less competition.
But, as the summer salmon season approaches, the only certainty is that fewer Alaskans will make a living from fish.
