Are fishermen on endangered list?
Fall, 1998 -- The world is in transition from fished to farmed seafood, putting Southeast jobs in jeopardy.
Salmon fishermen may follow buffalo hunters into the history books.
Already, salmon raised in floating pens have replaced the ones fishermen haul up in their nets on half the menus and grocery shelves in the world. Alaska, Washington and British Columbia fishermen, who once made a good living from the bountiful Pacific Coast, are now struggling to survive.
"It's been so bloody bad I'm going to lose my house," said Carl Hegglund, as he plucked fish from the net on a purse seiner docked in Port Hardy, on the north end of Vancouver Island, last August. "I'll bet you that 70 percent of the fleet haven't made expenses this year.''
In the middle of fishing season, when boat holds and bank accounts should be full, fishermen were going to the Port Hardy food bank for handouts.
"A lot of people are taking food down to the docks," said food bank manager Natasha Winston.
In the past, if few salmon were caught they were worth more, so fishermen still made money, but now farmed salmon set the prices for fresh fish. Alaska fishermen got half as much for their salmon in 1997 as they earned 10 years before. The prices are expected to fall further and salmon could end up cheaper than hamburger, by some estimates.
Now when fishermen in Canada or Alaska don't catch much, it just means more of their customers buy farmed fish and often discover they prefer it. Many of the people responsible for getting salmon to consumers would rather deal with farmed fish because it is available year-round at a consistent size and price. Consumers like the flavor and the lack of bones, which are pulled out by hand in countries where labor is cheap.
Fishermen are caught in a painful transition as the world switches from catching seafood to growing it, said David Conley, a Canadian fish farming consultant.
"In the same way that we don't eat wild meats anymore, fishing is really the last hunter-gatherer activity," Conley said.
Aquaculture, literally "cultivating in the water," now produces more than a quarter of all the seafood consumed by humans. At least 300 aquatic species are grown around the world, including mollusks, seaweed, crustaceans and fish, according to the United Nations.
The global catch of fish used for human food peaked in the mid-1980s. Analysts say it has reached its highest sustainable yield, 60 million tons. If current trends continue, production by fish farms could match or exceed what is caught by the world's fishermen by 2035, World Aquaculture President Michael New said in an address in Seattle in 1997.
Such predictions are pulling people away from the fishing business and into aquaculture. Seattle entrepreneur Gary Loverich switched from making nets for Bering Sea trawlers to designing cages for farmed fish 10 years ago when he realized fish farming was probably the wave of the future.
``If farmed fish ever get to the point where they could provide all the food requirements of the world,'' Loverich said, ``then wild fish are going to become purely recreational.''
That's already happened with Atlantic salmon, the salmon most frequently farmed. The last of the commercial wild fisheries for Atlantic salmon ended last summer off Greenland, leaving only subsistence and sport fishermen catching the few wild Atlantics left. At the same time, more people are eating Atlantic salmon than ever before and the fish are thriving in captivity around the world.
The transition from fishing to farming brings consumers a cheaper, more consistent product. But for Alaska, where 47 percent of the nongovernment basic employment is in the seafood industry, the decline in fishing is as heart-wrenching as the demise of the family farm is in the Midwest.
Unable to earn enough fishing in the summer to survive the winter, families are moving away from fishing towns such as Cordova, said Kathy Halgren, a fisherman on the Cordova District Fishermen United board. Last year three out of five purse seiners in Cordova didn't bother to fish because they had nowhere to sell their salmon, Halgren said.
``Somebody said to me `When are you going to get out of that? Don't you realize you're the last of the buffalo hunters?' '' Halgren said.
She's not the only ``buffalo hunter.'' More than a quarter of the residents of 70 Alaska cities and towns depend on fishing. Some families have fished for generations.
To protect Alaska's fishermen from competition and wild salmon runs from possible damage, the legislature banned finfish farming in 1990.
The ban has not protected fishermen from falling prices. In 1994 the statewide salmon catch brought in an average of 56 cents per pound. In 1998 the estimated value was 37 cents per pound.
At those prices, fishermen say it's they, not the wild salmon, who need to be listed as endangered.
In Canada, Chile and other places where fish farming thrives, many fishermen have already switched careers.
``The children of these fishermen will work in aquaculture. There are islands much smaller than this where almost all the residents work for us,'' said Juan Leiva Orrego, regional manager of CM Chiloe, a fish farming company in southern Chile. ``It's a slow process, but I believe it will happen.''
But many fishermen don't want anything to do with salmon they refer to derisively as ``jailed'' or ``pet'' fish, even if it would mean regular hours, benefits and a predictable paycheck.
``I guess I'm a hunter-gatherer, at least I like to think of myself as one, but look where they've gone,'' said Bruce McGinnis, a scallop fisherman in Eastport, Maine, where fish farms already fill the bays. ``There's people say we're dinosaurs, that our day is done. Well, I'll be a dinosaur till the day I die and I don't want no part of it (farming).''
Fishermen won't all go the way of the dinosaurs, say economists. Fishing will continue on a smaller scale, if only to provide an alternative to mass-produced salmon the way organic beef and free-range chickens do in meat departments now. And commercial fishing boats still need to catch low-value fish that are ground up to feed poultry, pigs, fish and other livestock, the end product of about a third of the global fish catch.
``If man is not too stupid, they will try to manage the oceanic heritage in a reasonable way,'' said Gert van Santen, senior fisheries specialist at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. ``That is, they will not pollute them, they will not destroy them and then there is nothing wrong with a modest exploitation.''
The trick may be finding a niche and holding onto it, something Alaska has been struggling with for a decade. Alaska's wild fishery can compete against the farmers, but only by offering a higher quality product at a lower price, said Terry Gardiner, president of Norquest Seafoods, based in Ketchikan. He expects smaller processing plants, such as Pelican Seafoods and the Icicle Seafood cannery in Homer, will close as the industry consolidates to survive.
``If you look at the chicken industry you'll see the same thing,'' Gardiner said. ``Every segment of the salmon industry will have to think what they're going to do.''
Gardiner's company once tried to keep its Ketchikan processing plant open in the winter by bringing in farmed salmon from British Columbia, but the backlash from Alaska fishermen was too great. Now Norquest is mechanizing to become more efficient and has started to sell farmed steelhead trout from Norway and Chile.
``What it is, is really a change of times,'' fish farming consultant Dave Conley said. ``It's coming, whether you want it to or not, so it's just a matter of how.''
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