Commercial fishing boats are lined up at the dock at Seward’s harbor on June 22. Numerous economic forces combined last year to create a $1.8 billion loss for the Alaska seafood industry, and related losses affected other states, according to a new report. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)
This article was first published by the Salish Current.
With the commercial salmon season coming to an end, 2024 is shaping up to be a lean year for commercial salmon fishers up and down the West Coast. That’s largely because prices for salmon that fishers receive at the dock are at an unusual low.
Warren “Buck” Gibbons lives in Bellingham and has been fishing for sockeye in Bristol Bay, Alaska, since 1976.
“When the salmon market first crashed in the early 2000s,” he said, “we thought all we had to do was pedal the bike a little bit harder and catch more volume. Well, we’re pedaling the bike as hard as we can, trying to bring that volume on board. But at some point you can only pedal the bike so hard. We’ve reached that point.”
In a good year, Gibbons said, a Bristol Bay sockeye fisher can gross $300,000–400,000 (they take home less after expenses). But when prices are as low as they were this summer, they’ll gross about $100,000 (again, the take-home pay is less).
For a fisher working on a smaller scale, including many tribal fishers, the situation is even grimmer. Dana Wilson of the Lummi Nation said that with prices so low, it hasn’t been worth selling salmon for the last couple years. He now keeps his entire catch to feed his own family, and relies mostly on crab for income.
Benchmarking
Dock prices in Bristol Bay and elsewhere are down because supply has been up, demand has been down, and costs in the supply chain have risen. All of these forces have put downward pressure on the price that fishers receive for their catch.
The salmon industry is exceedingly complex, which makes it difficult to generalize enough to name trends. There are five species of wild salmon on the West Coast, each with its own niche — or niches — in the retail market. Fishing regulations and the global seafood trade add an additional layer of complexity. The price of salmon at the dock can vary day by day, and dock by dock, and is usually determined in a private agreement between fishers and buyers.
A useful benchmark for talking about dock prices is Bristol Bay sockeye, because this price is publicly documented. In 2021, the price for Bristol Bay sockeye was $1.75 per pound. By 2023, it dropped to $.82 per pound. The 2024 price hasn’t been released yet, but Gibbons said that it would probably come back up to $1.25–$1.50 per pound. Dock prices for other species of salmon have followed similar trends.
Bumper years
Dock prices have declined in recent years in part because there’s been a surplus of wild salmon. While most of the West Coast is in the midst of a salmon crisis, with around a dozen salmon populations in Washington listed as endangered, sockeye runs in Bristol Bay have been strong in recent years.
In 2022, 74.8 million sockeye were harvested in Alaska, mostly in Bristol Bay — a record high. Gibbons said that when the 2023 fishing season opened, there was still a lot of sockeye left over in warehouse freezers from 2022.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently stepped in to buy up some of this surplus. This serves the double purpose of helping to stabilize prices and making this highly nutritious food available to national food and nutrition-assistance programs.
The surplus problem appears to be coming to an end. 2024 has been a slower salmon year in Alaska, with catches for every salmon species below expected, and, alarmingly, fish much smaller in size. The triple hit of low numbers combined with low weights and low prices has been especially difficult for Bristol Bay fishers.
Impact of farming
The unusual Bristol Bay sockeye surplus of 2022 explains the recent crash in salmon prices, but the decline actually started decades ago, with the introduction of farmed salmon.
In 1988, Bristol Bay fishers received more than $2 per pound for sockeye at the dock. By 2001 that price declined to under $.50 per pound. As farmed salmon came onto the market, wild salmon prices crashed.
Today, three to four times more farmed salmon is produced in the world than wild salmon harvested, according to the Certifications and Ratings Collaboration. Farmed salmon is imported to the U.S. primarily from Chile, Canada and Norway.
According to data provided by John Simeone, an independent consultant who specializes in natural resource supply chain analysis, imports of farmed salmon from Chile have grown to dominate the market in the last couple years.
Per Jessica Gephart, a professor at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences who specializes in the global seafood trade, “These super productive farms with lower labor costs are often able to compete better on price.”
Gibbons says it’s part of the nature of a wild fishery to be a little more colorful and chaotic. “Here you have this ragtag coastal fleet of fishermen who are all independent businessmen, who all march to the beat of their own drum, but it’s not nearly as efficient as a factory farm.” He also pointed to inconsistency on the quality of wild salmon versus how well farmed salmon are handled and packaged.
For some consumers, wild salmon carries a premium, and they’re willing to pay a little extra for it. But for others, the lower price and cosmetic perfection of farmed salmon determines their decision at the supermarket.
Through a loophole
Another possible contributor to the increase in supply is competition from wild salmon caught in Russia. Since 2022, there have been sanctions on Russian seafood directly entering the United States, but early on there was concern about a loophole which allowed Russian fish to enter the U.S. after it was processed in China.
In 2023, sanctions were expanded to include fish processed in other countries, including China. According to a 2024 investigation by Al Jazeera, enforcement of the sanctions remains difficult, because the “mandatory catch licenses showing where the fish is coming from are easily manipulable PDF files.” (This investigation focused mainly on white-fleshed fish exports from Russia, such as halibut, pollock and cod, and didn’t include any data specifically about salmon.)
But according to data provided by Simeone, competition from wild salmon from Russia is less of a factor than competition from farmed salmon in Chile. Simeone’s data dashboard shows that even if the sanctions were violated and wild salmon from Russia was imported to the U.S. via China, the total value of imported salmon from China was about 10.5% of the total imported from Chile in 2023.
Supply chain costs
Increased costs in the wild salmon supply chain have also helped push down dock prices. Alaska seafood industry economist and research analyst Andy Wink said that costs of unloading, trucking, processing and cold storage have all increased in recent years.
Information about these costs is difficult to obtain, because there are no publicly traded seafood processing companies on the West Coast. Trident Seafoods, the largest seafood company in the U.S., declined to comment for this article. So did Icy Strait Seafoods. Bornstein Seafoods did not return a phone call.
Wink also points to inefficiencies on the retail side, such as the extra labor costs of having a person behind a fish counter, and “product shrink” due to fish expiring before it can be sold. If supply chain costs are up and consumers aren’t willing to pay more, then the difference tends to hit dock prices.
Lower demand
On the demand side, global consumption of seafood is down. Seafood is a relatively expensive protein, and following the post-COVID economic slowdown and increased inflation, consumers are leaning toward less-expensive proteins such as chicken and pork. A decrease in demand pushes prices down.
High interest rates also make it more expensive for fish buyers to buy fish and hold them, so that makes commercial buyers more cautious, and lowers demand. Also, Wink said, the Japanese yen has been weak the past couple of years, which hurts demand for sockeye.
Seeking solutions
A complex tangle of variables has lowered salmon prices at the dock: a surplus of wild fish, competition from farmed fish, increased costs in the supply chain and lower demand due to larger economic trends.
Gibbons and Wilson suggested changes at the policy level could help stabilize their industry, for example, adding the fishing industry to the U.S. Farm Bill, so fishers could receive something equivalent to crop insurance. Wilson also suggested placing federal limits on farmed fish imports.
Both said that an important part of their work is educating the public on the environmental and health benefits of choosing wild versus farmed salmon.
For Wilson, the choice to eat wild salmon is also a philosophical one: “Don’t you want that fish that has left that stream, gone all the way out to the ocean, eaten whatever it eats in the ocean, then brings all that back? And you get to enjoy the benefits of a fish that has lived a natural life? Instead of a fish that swam around in a swimming pool, living in its own feces?”
To illustrate this point, Gibbons brought out a fan of paint chip colors that he had obtained from a salmon farm. “This is how farmed salmon get their color,” he said, “from a pigment that goes in their food. Otherwise, their flesh would be gray.”
Wink pointed to changes in seafood retail that could make it more efficient. If consumers could switch to buying frozen salmon filets, rather than fresh or thawed, it would reduce seafood-counter labor costs and product shrink due to expiration. These changes could lower costs for retail vendors and therefore take some of the price pressure off fishers.
For those willing to put in a little extra effort, Gephart suggested finding a fish vendor through the Local Catch Network’s Seafood Finder, a national database of sustainable, local, community-based seafood retailers. Or, she said, buy from a fish monger who has direct relationships with local fishers.
Another alternative — buying salmon dockside or directly off a boat — costs less and enables fishers to keep more. Consumers can buy fish at dockside sales at Squalicum Harbor in Bellingham on the first and third Saturdays of the month year-round, and dockside sales also happen casually at other harbors around the Salish Sea.