Many Alaskans fill their smokers and freezers as a bonus to their family's food supply. Recreation with benefits. For others it's not sport, it's survival.
This week, the state shut down the subsistence fishery on the Yukon. Folks on the river need about 50,000 salmon. Treaties with Canada require escapement to the headwaters of the river and the fish have been either slow coming in or not coming at all this year.
Last October, during a 17-day period, the pollock trawler fleet reported a bycatch of 24,878 king salmon. That's not pounds, that's fish. Another 11,896 kings were wasted in the same month. The entire year's tally of accidentally caught king salmon was 53,336 -- more than what is needed for our Alaska brothers and sisters who live on the Yukon.
In 2007, the bycatch of kings was over 120,000. Think of it. Fishing for fish stick and fake crab meat while dumping 1,200 tons of dead king salmon. How many of those fish would have been returning to the river this year? The crabs crawling around under a pollock boat are eating better than many Alaskans now cut off from their food source.
Many would argue that the now rare Yukon king salmon is the best tasting fish in Alaska -- better than the revered and extremely popular Copper River red. It has the highest omega-three content of any wild Alaska salmon. In Seattle, the Yukon kings, when you could get them, were marketed as Yukon Gold and fetched a handsome price per pound.
In terms of dollars, 120,000 Yukon king salmon averaging 20 pounds at $38.95 per pound are worth $93.48 million. If the factory trawlers had to pay for their bycatch, how long until the numbers dropped to the hundreds instead of the tens or hundreds of thousands of wasted fish?
The arguments have raged for years about rural preference. I realize the constitutional confines we live under. At what point do we think "the good of all Alaskans" is being realized when trawlers from Bellingham have more right to waste our resource than we have to catch it? What about the rights of those on the river drainage who have harvested and sustained the resource since long before there was a constitution?
A solution offered up has been, if it's too tough, move to town. Really? When the wealth of a family is partially gauged by their ability to harvest from wild lands and rivers to feed themselves and their neighbors, it's difficult to explain to people who haven't had the same experience. It's more than what happens on your plate; it's your life.
The fight isn't a fair one. The pollock fishery in Alaska is tremendous and worth over a billion dollars a year. They have lobbyists. They stay in the nice rooms during fishery meetings and buy top shelf. They can afford to. The folks on the river don't have the same advantages.
The situation gets reported with words like "bycatch," "constitutionality," "legal" and "limitations." Why aren't we using the words morality, justice, conservation and food security?
The North Pacific Fishery Management Council met earlier this month in Nome. A large part of the conversation was about the chum salmon bycatch. With the king run shut down, the chum run has become more important for subsistence use.
A solution was offered to the concerned. The Alaska pollock fleet, which captures 2.9 billion pounds of product a year, has been producing 2 million pounds of various fish bycatch a year. It distributes it to food banks across the country under Seattle-based Sea Share. They only recently offered this program to the people of Nome after they protested. How generous of them to offer this to the people of rural Alaska. Did they think that would make bycatch acceptable? Talk about not getting the point! In other words, for every 1,450 pounds of fish, they give back a pound. That's seven hundredths of a percent of their catch.
Subsistence isn't just what is in your freezer; for thousands of years it has been a way of life for Alaska families. Our constitution didn't give resource priority to the food bank in Seattle or anywhere else.
One pound given out of 1,450 is not only obscene, it's criminal.
Shannyn Moore is host of "The Shannyn Moore Show" on KOAN 1020 AM and 95.5 FM radio, and the television show "Moore Up North" on KYES Channel 5.
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