« August 2006 Table of Contents 
One Man's Opinion: Alaska’s salmon industry has a new friend
By Peter Redmayne
August 01, 2006
The dog days of summer are here, and that means the Alaska
salmon season is in full swing. With farmed-salmon suppliers
putting their customers on allocations and big U.S. and
European buyers demanding MSC-certified fish, it would seem
that the Alaska salmon industry has recovered from the doldrums
of the past decade.
This winter, trollers in Southeast Alaska pocketed as much
as $6 a pound for their kings - a nice payday and a far cry
from the $2 they got a few years ago. Then, in May, Copper
River fishermen received more than $5 a pound for their highly
touted king salmon and almost $2 for their reds - more than
they have ever received before.
But those fisheries account for less than 1 percent of
Alaska's salmon haul. To find out how the industry is really
doing, you need to look at the high-volume fisheries like
Bristol Bay, where almost 200 million pounds of reds were
landed this July. So if the salmon industry in the Last
Frontier has rebounded, why did bay gillnetters get a dime less
for their fish this summer when the catch was about the
same?
Blame the Japanese, the traditional market for frozen
sockeyes and longtime whipping boy for the Alaska salmon
industry. With some bay fish left over from last year and all
the Chilean coho they need readily available, the Japanese are
in no hurry to buy, so Alaska processors are having to hang on
to their fish. Sounds like the same old story. But it
isn't.
Instead of sending their sockeyes to Japan and waiting for
Japanese buyers to tell them all winter how weak the Japanese
market is, Alaska salmon processors now have other options. And
although they don't like to admit it, they can thank the
Chinese for the fact that they do. These days, Alaska
processors can send their fish over to China for further
processing. Or they can send it to Seattle and hang on to it
for a while and play the Chinese off against the Japanese.
In just the past three years, U.S. salmon exports to China
have soared fivefold, from about 6,000 metric tons to more than
30,000 metric tons. After the salmon season wraps up this year,
China will be behind only Japan as the largest single export
market for Alaska salmon (in 2005, Japan imported about 50,000
metric tons of U.S. salmon). And given the way things are
going, it may not be long before China overtakes Japan.
Most of the salmon going to China are the cheaper species,
like chums and pinks. In China, they are turned into boneless
blocks, fillets and portions for the U.S. and European markets.
Since the Chinese can do it so cheaply, a big, new market for
convenient, affordable frozen-salmon products has
developed.
But more-expensive fish like sockeyes are increasingly going
to China, too. This summer, Chinese processors were snapping up
sockeyes to meet retailers' demand for higher-quality,
MSC-certified wild-salmon fillets and portions. The Chinese are
also producing lightly salted sockeye fillets (via a process
known as tei-en) and exporting them to Japan, since they can
process them much more cheaply than the Japanese.
Alaska processors this summer were hanging on to some of
their fish longer not because they had to, but because they
wanted to, betting that increased demand would boost market
prices. With more competition for their fish, they were
enjoying some of the best margins they have seen in a long
time. It may take awhile for Bristol Bay fishermen to see $1 a
pound again, but clearly, the tide for the Alaska salmon
industry has turned, and the Chinese are the reason.