While Bristol Bay fishermen in Alaska's Naknek-Kvichak district worked furiously to haul in over 3 million salmon this past weekend, they received sobering news that the base price for Alaska sockeye dropped by more than half of its worth from last year.
Seafood giant Trident Seafoods announced the first price on Sunday of 50 cents per pound this year, dramatically less than last year when fishermen received a base price of $1.15 (€1.07) for Bristol Bay sockeye.
Canfisco-owned North Pacific Seafoods on Monday followed Trident's lead and announced it is paying its fishermen a base price of 50 cents as well. That announcement was followed later by Peter Pan Seafood announcing a 50 cents base price for its fishermen and an added a "late-season" bonus of 20 cents per pound for those fishermen who continue fishing for the company after July18.
All three companies give fishermen up to 30 cents more per pound for handling incentives that improve the quality of the fish.
"Bristol Bay fishermen are outraged by the 50 cent base price," Andy Wink, director of the Bristol Bay Regional Development Association (BBRSDA), which works on behalf of Alaska fishermen to increase the awareness and value of the Bristol Bay brand throughout the supply chain, told IntraFish. "I'm sure there will be a lot of discussions after this season about what changes can and should be made."
Fishermen in the bay quickly took to social media following Trident's letter to its fleet announcing the price, some asking why the state cannot get involved more in the issue to make prices more transparent. Other fishermen lamented their pay this year will not even be enough to cover expenses such as fuel, food, airfare, and insurance.
Matthew Hoogendorn, who has been fishing in the Nushagak river district this season and selling to Alaska's Best Seafood, told IntraFish on July 14 he stopped fishing early for both his family's drift boat and setnet site in the district, although drifters normally stop around July 20.
"It's an epic failure, a loss on all levels in terms of work," he said of this year's base price. "Those companies will make profit but not us fisherman. This summer was a big waste of time, money, energy. I could have took my family up north to look for mammoth tusks and bones and made a lot more then we did fishing this summer."
In its letter to the fleet about the price drop, Trident said processors are struggling under the weight of a massive carryover of inventory resulting from last year's record harvest of 60 million fish in the bay.
The company said the spring of 2023 brought "sharp decrease" in wholesale prices with those "depressed" prices expected to continue into the fall.
The company also pointed to Russia's disruption of the global seafood market, which has greatly disrupted the US Alaska pollock market in particular.
Through the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Alaska pollock producers have tried to buoy the US Alaska pollock market amid "deteriorating market conditions" and combat a global supply that still outpaces demand.
In recent months, the USDA has been ramping up its purchasing and bid requests for both wild salmon and pollock, following marketing groups pleading for help with cutting the glut and making room for even more fish.
Now with the peak of the Bristol Bay fishing season likely over, there is not much more that fishermen can do to change the season's dynamics, even if they stop fishing.
"Russia has nothing to do with price per pound," Hoogedorn said.
"First the companies said it was because the amount of fish we hauled in last summer, now they are pointing at Russia. There is no better time to hold a strike or force the companies to establish a price before next summer. If I knew the price per pound, I wouldn't have paid thousands of dollars on airfare just to make a few bucks."
