Seafood Landings Up – But Value Down – in Many 2015 Alaska Fisheries

commercial-fishery-landings-2015The National Marine Fisheries Service released its annual snapshot of the nation’s fisheries Wednesday morning. Among other things, it showed that Americans ate, on average, one more pound of seafood in 2015 than they did in 2014 – now up to 15-and-a-half pounds.

Dutch Harbor is still the U.S. port with the most tonnage crossing the docks, with 787-million in 2015. That’s up 25-million pounds from the prior year. Kodiak’s landings, in second, were also up, by a respectable 35-million pounds, from 477-million to 514-million.

However, the value of those landings was actually lower. In 2014, all Kodiak fisheries netted $143-million at the dock. In 2015, even with the increase in harvest, the value was worth just $138-million. The value was up $27-million in Dutch Harbor to $218-million. Tops in the nation, though, thanks to the price of scallops on the East Coast, was New Bedford, Massachusetts, with a dockside value of $322-million, which is also down from last year, by about $7-million.

Third in landings nationwide is loosely described as “Aleutian Islands,” which saw a decrease of 4-million pounds to 467-million total. Its seafood value did rise, going from $107-million to $111-million.

The Alaska Peninsula, Naknek, Cordova, Seward, Sitka, Ketchikan and Petersburg round out the Alaska top 10, with landings ranging from 176-million pounds to 70-million. The value of those landings ranged from $90-million on the Alaska Peninsula to $39-million in Petersburg.

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