Economics of Harvesting Weigh Heavy on Alaska’s Fishing Industry

The rising costs of harvesting seafood are weighing heavily on the seafood industry, with employment down 8% in 2023, according to a report in Alaska Economic Trends magazine.

The summary in the magazine’s November 2024 edition notes that prices didn’t dramatically increase in 2024, so overall employment isn’t likely to bounce back, but if prices do recover for most species, there will be fish to catch.

Over the last decade, fish harvesting employment has fallen more than 30%. The only industry that fared worse in that time period was oil & gas, according to Joshua Warren, an economist with the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

The seafood industry in Alaska has struggled over the past year, with some fisheries closed, including the Bering Sea snow crab fishery. Salmon runs were plentiful, with exceptions such as the Yukon Delta, but prices were flat or falling.

The number of crew licenses had rebounded by about 400 since 2020, but in 2023, 12% fewer people bought a crew license, erasing that gain, Warren noted.

Many harvesters opted not to fish because of lower dock prices and some processors were no longer accepting the catch. Such appeared to be the case in late October, when the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced the first herring fishery since 1998 for Cordova, but area canneries were closed and it was uncertain whether any of them would open to buy the catch.

The miscellaneous shellfish harvests, excluding crab, and mostly shrimp and sea cucumber, was a bright spot with 21.5% more jobs than in 2022, but that is a small category. The real driver was fourfold employment in May with the shrimp fishery moved to a new month to allow shrimp to lay eggs before being harvested.

Jobs harvesting sablefish, or black cod, were down 7.7% over the year after a limited pandemic recovery the year before, erasing progress in that fishery.

Jobs harvesting groundfish species, mainly pollock and cod, fell 6.1% from 2022, at which time the fisheries had recovered some from past losses. That decline put groundfish harvests well below their historical employment average.

Even small growth in January and April failed to offset the often-double-digit percent drops in summer.

Salmon remains the state’s largest fishery, with high value harvests that are so labor intensive, although tanking value was a culprit, making the statewide salmon harvest the seventh highest on record for poundage since 1985.

Employment in salmon fisheries was down 11% in 2023, a loss of 376 jobs. That combined with the preceding three years’ losses means that salmon fishing was down to two-thirds of its peak employment year, 2015.

Southeast Alaska proved to be the only region to add harvesting jobs overall in 2023, although the combined gains and losses added up to just one additional job, for a total of 1,740 positions overall.

Still, the stability in employment in Southeast Alaska in 2023 looked impressive compared to double-digit percent declines in other regions.

Source: https://fishermensnews.com/economics-of-harvesting-weigh-heavy-on-alaskas-fishing-industry/