There are multiple factors that have contributed to Alaska fisheries’ current downturn and the seafood industry’s recent economic slump, among them environmental regulations and habitat loss.
But according to numerous policymakers, the majority of the blame can be laid not on U.S. policies, but on one of America’s biggest geopolitical adversaries: Russia.
At a news conference in late May, U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) commented that Russia has flooded seafood markets with inexpensive product, leading to prices falling significantly and hurting U.S. processing companies and fishermen.
“Russians have essentially admitted they’re not just at war in Ukraine, they’re at war with the American fishing industry,” he said.
About a month prior to Sullivan’s remarks, Alaska’s sole U.S. House of Representatives member, Mary Peltola, said at the annual ComFish trade show in Kodiak that the U.S. seafood industry has been significantly affected by Russia’s flooding of the market.
“Alaskan fishermen are at an unfair disadvantage competing against the unsustainable fishing and forced labor in foreign imports,” she said.
Additionally, Alaska’s senior U.S. senator, Lisa Murkowski, also delved into the issue via a video address at ComFish, following up on the address that she gave last year.
“When I spoke to you all a year ago there was really no telling what 2023 had in store for us,” she remarked. “We did not know the extent to which Russia’s predatory pricing would upset the global market.”
“We did not know,” she continued, “that base prices for salmon would plummet.”
Oddly enough, Russian seafood has been banned from import into the United States since 2022, following the Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine. But despite the ban, there was a loophole in the law that allowed Russian-caught seafood processed in third-party countries, such as Asian nations, to be sold in America.
The loophole was closed via a President Biden executive order last December, but it remains to be seen how much this will eventually help U.S. fishermen and those that employ and/or buy product from them.
In the meantime, Murkowski has said that she’s working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to continue Alaska seafood purchases. The USDA bought about $200 million worth of Alaska seafood to boost the industry in 2023, and announced plans to buy nearly another $150 million worth this year.
Murkowski also brought up a continued push from Alaska’s congressional delegation to include fisheries in the upcoming federal farm bill reauthorization. She and Sullivan brought the ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, John Boozman of Arkansas, to Kodiak last year to show parallels between fisheries and farming.
In early June, Alaska Public Media published a thorough and insightful article about the U.S.-Russia seafood conflict and global fishing as a whole, and it states that Sullivan has met with the U.S. commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, whose department regulates the American fishing industry in an effort to lobby the Biden administration to convince other the members of the Group of 7, aka G7, bloc of nations—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom—to enact their own bans of Russian seafood.
It remains to be seen if all, or any of America’s G7 partners, follow the U.S.’s lead, but seeing how Russia has knocked the bottom out of global seafood pricing, it’s something that each should consider, lest they see their national industries suffer as American seafood companies have over the past several months.
Alaska Public Media’s story, which is an in-depth and enlightening piece that I highly recommend, can be read at https://tinyurl.com/bddp2nxh. And for more on the struggles of the U.S. seafood industry, see the article on page 19 of this issue.
Managing Editor Mark Nero can be reached by phone at (619) 313-4351 or via email at mark@maritimepublishing.com.