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Seafood Products
BIG CHANGES ARE UNDER WAY IN North Pacific fisheries. Foreign high-seas fishing is being phased out within the U.S. economic zone off Alaska, and a boom in American use of bottomfish species has begun. To get supply, overseas purchasers are buying fish and fish products from U.S. fishermen and processors and investing in new onshore processing capability.
Japan is Alaska's biggest customer for fish. Fifty-four percent of Alaska's total fish production is exported and 75 percent of all exported seafood, mostly salmon, goes to Japan. Alaska supplies 10 percent of Japan's total demand. Almost 1 billion worth of fish from Alaskan waters, $700 million of it salmon, goes to Japan -- half directly from Alaska, the rest by way of Seattle. Japanese seem almost insatiable in their seafood appetites.
Meanwhile, Alaska's fisheries are booming. State and federal biologists report fish stocks are in good shape -- both for near-shore salmon fisheries and offshore bottomfish like pollock and cod -- even after several years of record catches. Although the 1987 salmon harvest dipped below 100 million for the first time in years, fishermens' earnings still set a record, thanks mainly to high Japanese demand for the high-value sockeye salmon. Prospects are for continued good harvests of major salmon and groundfish species.
Prices also may stay firm. A strong yen likely will keep salmon prices up; fisheries analysts calculate 75 percent of the rise in sockeye salmon prices in recent years can be explained by the rising yen. Meanwhile, a shortage of Atlantic whitefish stocks -- particularly cod -- should keep international competition keen for the plentiful cod and pollock off Alaska's coasts.
Japan buys Alaskan salmon roe (eggs), sea urchins and crab for sale as delicacies, and bottomfish like pollock form a dietary staple. But Japan long has had the greatest interest in salmon. It consumes about one-third of the world's salmon. For years most Japanese salmon consumption, about 350,000 metric tons yearly, was supplied by the nation's high-seas fishing fleets, mostly from Alaskan and Soviet Bering Sea waters.
But the USSR has been reducing Japan's fishing quotas sharply, and under the Magnuson Act, Japan and other foreign fleets are being phased out of U.S. controlled North Pacific areas. Japan's high-seas salmon catch...