Does more fish mean more money?
Bristol Bay in Alaska hosts one of the world’s largest salmon fisheries every year, targeting bountiful runs of sockeye salmon. The fishery is managed using escapement goals that ensure sufficient salmon escape the fishery every year to spawn upriver. Recently, increased escapement goals were proposed for Bristol Bay that were intended to allow more salmon to spawn upriver, because of calculations suggesting this would lead to larger average catches. However, fishing communities and industry opposed this change, arguing that this would lead to more variable catches, and less predictable profits and tax revenues from fishing. A new economic analysis provides evidence to support this stance: increasing escapement would lead to more years with no or low catches, but in years with high salmon runs, catches would not increase much because processors lack the capacity to handle large salmon runs in Bristol Bay. The net effect would be more fish but not necessarily higher profits. Furthermore, parts of the salmon industry that are tied to a specific fishing district, and that use small boats or set-nets, would be more vulnerable since they would be less able to shift fishing to a different district during more frequent years of low catches. The analysis shows the importance of modeling biological, social, and economic factors together before making changes to fisheries management rules. The authors of the paper that appears in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences are Jocelyn Wang (Economics, University of Washington), SAFS professors Chris Anderson and Ray Hilborn, Curry Cunningham of NOAA, and Michael Link of the Bristol Bay Science and Research Institute.