Lower prices in the market are souring what’s predicted to be another large salmon run.
“In general, a lot of prices for species are down,” said Andy Wink, Senior Seafood Analyst with the Juneau-based McDowell Group, “especially sockeye and chum.”
Prices have dropped $0.05, $0.10 and more than $0.50 in some cases.
Wink and local processors pointed to two big factors: currency and supply.
The pink salmon market, for example, is “gearing up for a huge harvest,” Wink noted, and the wholesale will be dictated by how big the run is. There’s still a “fair amount” left over from the 2013 and 2014 seasons.
According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G), 2013’s season was unprecedented with a harvest of 95 million pink salmon.
“The 2015 harvest forecast of 58 million pink salmon is well above the recent 10-year average harvest of 41 million pink salmon, and a harvest of that magnitude would be in the top ten harvests since 1960,” according to a guide put out by ADF&G’s Andy Piston, pink and chum salmon project leader in Ketchikan, and Steve Heinl, Ketchikan regional research biologist.
Wink said farmed salmon is “pretty well supplied,” too.
The other contributor to the drop in prices is the U.S. strong dollar. It’s weakening the export market as buyers would have to, in many cases, give more in their currency to pay the same U.S. price for Alaskan fish.
Roughly two-thirds of Alaska’s seafood is exported, according to the Seafood Market Bulletin.
While the U.S. dollar has gotten stronger, Wink said, the Japanese yen, Russian ruble and European euro values have gone down. Russia and Japan are big competitors for the U.S.
But there is a silver lining.
As prices come down, Wink said more promotions can be expected. And more promotion leads to higher demand and consumption down the road.
Those effects may be slow to be seen, Wink added, but good for the long term.
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