Fishing, Commercial

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For Generations of Alaskans, a Livelihood Is Under Threat

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Petersburg, Alaska, is as pretty a seaside town as any you’ll find across the filigree of fjords and foggy islands that make up the state’s maritime coast. Statuary and floral designs evidence its proud Scandinavian heritage, and bald eagles soar across the narrow strait that separates it from a national forest. It doesn’t have room for the giant cruise ships that disgorge thousands of passengers into Ketchikan and Juneau, but it is perfectly situated for its sustaining industry: fishing.Norwegian fishermen settled in Petersburg in the 1800s, finding it an ideal jumping off point to pursue salmon, crab and halibut. Hundreds of vessels now dock in there and sell their catch to the two major processors, which head and gut the fish before either canning or freezing it on its eventual path to the dinner table. One of the plants was built more than a century ago, and its owner is the town’s largest private employer.Few people know the business better than Glorianne Wollen, a fisherman’s daughter who operates a large crab boat in a partnership and also serves as harbor master, working from a tiny desk tucked into a bustling office with a little dog at her feet. A Petersburg native, she’s seen a lot of change.“In the good old days, the town was very alive with discussion, everybody was involved so everybody had a stake, everybody knew what was going on, things happened in real time,” Ms. Wollen recalled. That buzz receded as boats got bigger and more efficient, pursued more species and stayed on the water for more of the year to maximize their investment.“It takes two guys to do what 20 used to,” she said. “There’s just fewer of us.”Petersburg doesn’t have room for the giant cruise ships that dock in other Alaskan cities, but it is perfectly situated for its sustaining industry: fishing“There’s just fewer of us,” said Glorianne Wollen, a Petersburg native and fisherman’s daughter who now serves as the town’s harbor master.The Ranks of Alaska Fishermen Are ThinningAcross all fisheries, the number of people holding permits who harvest fish commercially each year has fallen precipitously since the 1980s.

Source: Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission, State of AlaskaBy The New York TimesSalmon Prices Have Been Mostly Flat for DecadesAdjusted for inflation, prices that fishermen are paid per pound of salmon they deliver to processors rose slightly in the 2010s and took a big hit in 2023.

Source: Alaska Department of Fish and GameBy The New York Times More

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    Immigrants in Maine Are Filling a Labor Gap. It May Be a Prelude for the U.S.

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    Maine has a lot of lobsters. It also has a lot of older people, ones who are less and less willing and able to catch, clean and sell the crustaceans that make up a $1 billion industry for the state. Companies are turning to foreign-born workers to bridge the divide.“Folks born in Maine are generally not looking for manufacturing work, especially in food manufacturing,” said Ben Conniff, a founder of Luke’s Lobster, explaining that the firm’s lobster processing plant has been staffed mostly by immigrants since it opened in 2013, and that foreign-born workers help keep “the natural resources economy going.”Maine has the oldest population of any U.S. state, with a median age of 45.1. As America overall ages, the state offers a preview of what that could look like economically — and the critical role that immigrants are likely to play in filling the labor market holes that will be created as native-born workers retire.Nationally, immigration is expected to become an increasingly critical source of new workers and economic vibrancy in the coming decades.It’s a silver lining at a time when huge immigrant flows that started in 2022 are straining state and local resources across the country and drawing political backlash. While the influx may pose near-term challenges, it is also boosting the American economy’s potential. Employers today are managing to hire rapidly partly because of the incoming labor supply. The Congressional Budget Office has already revised up both its population and its economic growth projections for the next decade in light of the wave of newcomers.In Maine, companies are already beginning to look to immigrants to fill labor force gaps on factory floors and in skilled trades alike as native-born employees either leave the work force or barrel toward retirement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘We Have Fish, That’s Our Currency’

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    Just before midnight, David O’Neill navigated his trawler into the harbor in Union Hall, a small port in southwestern Ireland, the wake from the vessel sending tiny waves slapping against the pier.The crew swiftly unloaded their catch, using a crane to lift ice-packed crates of haddock and hake from the hold of the Aquila under bright spotlights.Less than an hour later, the Aquila would depart for its final trip. Two days later, the crew stripped the vessel’s contents — chains, buoys, ropes, steel cables, and hooks — and ejected them onto the pier, on their way to a shipyard to be scrapped.“This is coming with me,” Mr. O’Neill said as he unscrewed the Aquila’s wooden steering wheel. “It reminds you of all you’ve been through on this boat.”Crew members removing the nets from the Aquila after the ship’s last voyage.“This is coming with me,” said David O’Neill, the skipper of the Aquila, as he unscrewed the vessel’s wooden steering wheel. “It reminds you of all you’ve been through on this boat.”The Aquila is one of dozens of Irish boats being scrapped as part of a voluntary government decommissioning plan introduced after Britain withdrew from the European Union, and transferred 25 percent of Europe’s fishing rights in British waters. That significantly limited Irish vessels in the numbers of fish they are allowed to catch — an anticipated annual loss of 43 million euros ($46 million), making Ireland one of the European nations most affected.Although fishing is a small industry in Ireland, in some coastal communities, it has been the backbone of the economy, even as it has been whittled down over the years. But beyond economics, fishing has been an essential way of life for generations. Locals fear the Brexit quotas and subsequent retiring of boats will be the final death knell. More

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    Covid Vaccine and Fisheries Deals Close a ‘Roller Coaster’ W.T.O. Meeting

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    Members of the global trade group were forced to scale back plans for more ambitious agreements, but they were ultimately able to reach several deals at a meeting in Geneva.WASHINGTON — Members of the World Trade Organization announced several agreements on Friday at the close of their first in-person ministerial conference in four years, pledging to rein in harmful government policies that have encouraged overfishing and relax some controls on intellectual property in an effort to make coronavirus vaccines more widely available.The agreements were hard fought, coming after several long nights of talks and extended periods when it appeared that the meeting would yield no major deals at all. Indeed, while the parties were able to reach a compromise on vaccine technology, the divide remained so deep that both sides criticized the outcome.“It was like a roller coaster, but in the end we got there,” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, said at an early-morning news conference in Geneva after the group’s members approved the final package of agreements.The deals were an important success for an organization that has come under fire for being unwieldy, bureaucratic and mired in disagreement. But several of the government officials, business leaders and trade experts who descended on the trade body’s headquarters on the shore of Lake Geneva this week described the agreements as the bare minimum and said the trade organization, while still operational, was hardly thriving.Wendy Cutler, a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute and a former trade negotiator, wrote in an email that the deals, “when packaged together, are enough to claim success but by no means suggest that the W.T.O. has turned a corner.”Ministers ended up stripping out some of the most meaningful elements of a deal to combat harmful subsidies for fishers that have depleted global fish stocks, Ms. Cutler said, and the pandemic response was “too little, too late.”The outcomes “seem particularly meager in light of the grave challenges facing the global economy, ranging from sluggish growth to a serious food crisis to climate change,” she said.To address the growing food crisis around the world, which has been brought on by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the group’s members made a mutual declaration to encourage trade in food and try to avoid export bans that are exacerbating shortages.The trade organization also agreed to temporarily extend a ban on taxes or customs duties on electronic transmissions, including e-books, movies or research that might be sent digitally across borders. But the debate was difficult and protracted over an issue that many businesses and some government officials argued should be low-hanging fruit.“Ministers spent the entire week preventing the demise of the e-commerce moratorium, instead of looking ahead at how to strengthen the global economy,” said Jake Colvin, the president of the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents major multinational businesses.One of the trade body’s biggest accomplishments was reaching an agreement to help protect global fishing stocks that has been under negotiation for the last two decades.Governments spend $22 billion a year on subsidies for their fishing fleets, often encouraging industrial fishing operations to catch far more fish than is sustainable, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. The agreement would create a global framework for sharing information and limiting subsidies for illegal and unregulated fishing operations, as well as for vessels that are depleting overfished stocks or operating on the unregulated high seas.In the organization’s over 25-year history, the deal was only the second agreement on adjusting trade rules to be signed by all of the body’s members. And it was the group’s first agreement centered on environmental and sustainability issues.Oceans advocates had mixed reactions.Isabel Jarrett, manager of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ project to reduce harmful fisheries subsidies, called the agreement “a turning point in addressing one of the key drivers of global overfishing.”“Curbing the subsidies that drive overfishing can help restore the health of fisheries and the communities that rely on them,” she said. “The W.T.O.’s new agreement is a step towards doing just that.”But others expressed disappointment. “Our oceans are the big loser today,” said Andrew Sharpless, the chief executive of Oceana, a nonprofit group focused on ocean conservation. “After 20 years of delay, the W.T.O. failed again to eliminate subsidized overfishing and in turn is allowing countries to pillage the world’s oceans.”As part of the agreement, negotiations will continue with the goal of making recommendations on additional provisions to be considered at next year’s ministerial conference.World Trade Organization members also agreed to loosen intellectual property rules to allow developing countries to manufacture patented Covid-19 vaccines under certain circumstances. Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, said in a statement that the trade organization’s members “were able to bridge differences and achieve a concrete and meaningful outcome to get more safe and effective vaccines to those who need it most.”The issue of relaxing intellectual property rights for vaccines had become highly controversial. It pitted the pharmaceutical industry and developed countries that are home to their operations, particularly in Europe, against civil society organizations and delegations from India and South Africa.Stephen J. Ubl, the president and chief executive of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said the agreement had “failed the global population.” Global vaccine supplies are currently plentiful, he said, and the agreement did little to address “real issues affecting public health,” such as supply chain bottlenecks or border tariffs on medicines.Lori Wallach, the director of the Rethink Trade program at the American Economic Liberties Project, called the outcome “a dangerous public health fail” and “a vulgar display of multilateralism’s demise” in which a few rich countries and pharmaceutical companies blocked the will of more than 100 countries to improve access to medicines. The agreement did not loosen intellectual property rights for treatments or therapeutics, as civil society groups had wanted.Divisions between rich and poor countries and between big business and civil society groups were apparent in other negotiations, which were also overlaid with the geopolitical challenges of a global pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.The World Trade Organization requires consensus from all of its 164 members to reach agreements, and India emerged as a significant obstacle in several of the negotiations, including over e-commerce duties and fishery subsidies.Mr. Colvin said the requirement of unanimous consent had put severe limits on the trade body’s ability to produce meaningful outcomes. “The system is set up to reward hostage-taking and bad faith,” he said.Catrin Einhorn More

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    On the Water in Alaska, Where Salmon Fishing Dreams Live On

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    My camera lens is pressed against the window of the small floatplane as it flies below a thick ceiling of clouds. The mist clings to the hillsides of a temperate rainforest that descend steeply to the rocky coastline of southeast Alaska.The plane banks, and a tiny village comes into view. A scattering of houses are built on stilts on the water’s edge. We circle and I see fishing boats tied up next to a large dock and a floating post office. The pilot throttles down and the pontoons skim across the glassy water inside the bay. We taxi to the public dock and I step out in front of the Point Baker general store.The fishing village of Point Baker, home to about 20 Alaskans.A floatplane on its weekly route between villages in southeast Alaska.Life along the Alaska coast is economically and culturally dependent on fishing. Each summer, millions of salmon — after maturing in the ocean — begin their journey back to the rivers in which they were spawned. Fishermen, along with whales, eagles and bears, share in the abundance.For many in Alaska, salmon represent the wild, untamed landscape that makes their home so special.A pink salmon — or “humpy,” as they’re called locally — spawns in a small creek. Alaska has over 6,000 miles of coastline, more than four times that of any other state. There are a multitude of tiny fishing villages scattered along the edge of the Pacific Ocean, and many are only accessible by boat or plane. A number of these remote communities are Indigenous villages, where fishing has been a cornerstone of life for thousands of years.Klawock, an Alaska Native community, has been home to the Tlingit people for thousands of years.A fisherman in Lynn Canal, an inlet into southeast Alaska.I grew up fishing in the rivers and lakes of Vermont. My fascination with fish led me to study the history of early industrialization in New England and to gain an understanding of the toll that pollution, dams and overfishing had on East Coast waterways.Atlantic salmon were once abundant in the Northeast, but their numbers have significantly decreased.Bristol Bay is home to the largest sockeye salmon run on earth.A fisherman prepares his boat for the Bristol Bay sockeye season in Dillingham, Alaska.My hunger grew to witness a river teeming with wild salmon and a culture still interdependent with the bounty of the ocean. After college, I began traveling to Alaska annually to fly fish and pursue work as a photojournalist and documentary filmmaker.A tributary of the Chilkat River in Haines, Alaska, runs blue with glacial meltwater.On the dock in Point Baker, I load my bag onto the boat of my friend Joe Sebastian, a local fisherman. Joe fires up the diesel engine and we pull out of the harbor.Joe, originally from the Midwest, moved to Point Baker in 1978 with the hopes of becoming an independent fisherman. When he arrived, he bought a commercial fishing permit for $20 and a small wooden skiff with a six-horsepower outboard motor for about $1,000.“The world was a lot less complicated back then,” he says.Joe began to fish, learning the ins and outs of salmon trolling from the old-timers who had called Alaska home since before it became a state. Trolling is a highly selective, low-impact method of fishing that involves dragging lines through the water and catching individual salmon that choose to bite the hooks. Not to be confused with trawling, which entails the use of giant drag nets, trolling is slower and lower volume than other methods of salmon fishing. It also maintains the highest quality of fish.Joe admires an ocean-bright coho salmon caught near his home in Point Baker.Freshly caught coho salmon.After a decade of fishing in Alaska, Joe and his wife, Joan, bought a 42-foot wooden fishing boat. They raised their children in Point Baker in the winter, and on their boat, the Alta E, in the summer.“Honestly, it wasn’t always a great time — seasickness, cramped quarters and clothes that smelled like fish,” their daughter Elsa, now 30, says, reflecting on her childhood. Still, she became a fisherman anyway. “Spending summers on the ocean becomes who you are,” she says. “I love the way that fishing makes me fundamentally part of an ecosystem.”Elsa Sebastian aboard her parents’ boat, the Alta E.Elsa fillets some of the day’s catch for the family smokehouse.Alaska is home to five species of Pacific salmon. These fish are anadromous; they begin their lives in freshwater rivers and lakes and eventually make their way down rivers and into the ocean. Depending on the species, salmon may spend between about one and seven years in the ocean before beginning their journey home to the freshwater where they were born.The ability of salmon to find their way home is one of nature’s greatest miracles. Among other navigational aids, salmon can detect a single drop of water from its home stream mixed in 250 gallons of saltwater.Once salmon enter their native watershed, some spawn immediately and others travel a thousand miles or more upriver. Soon after reproducing, they die and decompose.Processing a salmon by the light of a headlamp.Over the last 50 years, anadromous fish populations have declined significantly in California, Oregon and Washington. Alaska remains the United State’s last great salmon stronghold.Salmon are extremely sensitive to water quality and depend on cold, clean, oxygenated water to survive — and Alaska is not immune to the same threats that have decimated salmon farther south. Logging and mining degrade some salmon habitat in Alaska, and climate change is compounding these impacts.Jenny Bennis, a local Yup’ik fisherwoman, picks salmon from a beach net in Bristol Bay. Katherine Carscallen, a fisherwoman and activist in Dillingham, Alaska, navigates her boat while fishing at the mouth of the Nushagak River.Many Alaskans are still concerned about the threat of the proposed Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, the permit for which was denied by the Army Corps of Engineers in November. This region of southwestern Alaska supports the world’s largest sockeye salmon run. Since the 1960s, more than half of the sockeye salmon returning to Bristol Bay have been caught each year, without an effect on their overall abundance, according to Daniel Schindler, a biologist at the University of Washington, in Seattle.Dillingham, its population around 2,300, is the largest community in Bristol Bay, despite the fact that there are no roads connecting the community to the outside world.Each summer, thousands of seasonal workers fly into Dillingham to work on boats or in processing plants.Lured by this legendary fishery, a few friends fly in to Dillingham to join me on a 10-day fly-fishing excursion deep in the backcountry, on the fringes of the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge. We load a floatplane with food, an inflatable raft, fishing rods and camping gear. We fly low over the tundra, crossing river after river full of salmon. From a few hundred feet above, we can see the red sockeye in dense schools in the slow eddies of the rivers.We land on an alpine lake at the headwaters of the Goodnews River, inflate our raft and float downstream. We begin casting, and the action is nonstop. Oliver Sutro, a fisherman, displays a Chinook salmon.For three friends who grew up in New England, the trip is the manifestation of a dream we’ve held our whole lives. As children we stared into deep pools of rivers in New England, imagining them pulsing with monster fish.Here in Alaska, that dream is still alive.Oliver Sutro casts into the current on the Goodnews River.A campsite on the bank of the Goodnews River in southwestern Alaska.Colin Arisman is a nonfiction filmmaker, photographer and writer. You can follow his work on Vimeo and Instagram.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. 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