Limited availability of king crab and snow crab has boosted U.S. buyer interest, in defiance of a downward sales trend across the seafood category.
On 15 October, the red king crab fishery in Alaska’s Bristol Bay officially opened with a 2.2-million-pound quota, following a two-year closure. As recently as 2016, the total allowable harvest was set at 8.47 million pounds; in 1980, it was 130 million pounds.
Alaska crab fishermen have thus far in the season reported receiving solid prices for their catch – around USD 8.00 (EUR 7.37) from processors or up to USD 25.00 (EUR 23.05) selling directly to consumers, but said the limited quota meant their earnings from the season would not sustain them for long.
“Having a lack of snow crab for the second year in a row, it does make things very, very difficult. It really did put the fleet in financial dire straits,” Alaska Bering Sea Crabbers President Gabriel Prout told Alaska Public Media.
However, with the Bering Sea snow crab fishery remaining closed for a second year after a marine heatwave decimated the population in 2019, Prout said several crab fishing vessel owners are in financial trouble.
“A lot of fishermen, you know, bought into the resource when it was predicted to be extremely healthy,” Prout said. “Now the banks are trying to figure out ways to collect on that revenue that’s just not there because the seasons are closed.”
Alaska Department of Fish and Game Biologist Mark Stichert said reopening the red king crab fishery was a close call.
“The decline has stopped. But whether or not we’re seeing a rebound in the biomass is hard to say,” Stichert said, according to the Alaska Beacon.
In Kodiak, Alaska, fishermen are looking forward to the tanner crab season, which begins in January 2024. But the quota has been limited to 3 million pounds, down from 5.8 million pounds in 2023, while the Chignik tanner crab fishery will be closed altogether and the South Peninsula tanner quota has been set at just 480,000 pounds. Alaska’s Westward region as a whole will see its tanner crab quota drop to 3.48 million pounds, less than half of the 7.3-million-pound quota in 2023, though tanner crab populations are on a five- to seven-year cycle.
In 2023, the average price paid to fishermen for tanner crab was USD 3.35 (EUR 3.08) per pound, with the average crab weighing 2.2 pounds, valuing the fishery at nearly USD 20 million (EUR 18.4 million), according to the Kodiak Daily Mirror.
Alaska Department of Fish and Game Regional Shellfish Manager Nat Nichols said he’s hoping for improvement in the fishery to allow for another larger harvest in 2028 or 2029. But that won’t make up for the loss of the snow crab population if it doesn’t return to its previous levels, AFD&G Bristol Bay Acting Area Managing Biologist Ethan Nichols said.
“Hopefully, the environmental conditions will remain favorable over the next several years and the small crab that we see in the current population will grow into those larger size classes that the fishery targets,” Nichols said. “We will have a small Bristol Bay red king crab fishery this year and small tanner crab fishery. But it doesn’t make up for the economic losses of the snow crab fishery being closed for now two years in a row.”
Snow crab appear to be particularly sensitive to warming waters caused by climate change, according to NOAA. Snow crabs thrive in water temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius and below, but Bering Sea waters are now averaging 3.5 degrees Celsius and the average is predicted to rise at an increasingly faster rate in the future, leaving NOAA and AFD&G scientists to question whether a full recovery is possible.
University of Alaska-Fairbanks Fisheries and Oceans Professor Emeritus Gordon Kruse said Alaska’s snow crab range is shifting north, but the species is hitting a growth barrier north of the Bering Strait.
“They’re stunted,” he told Alaska News Source, saying it looks like the Chukchi Sea appears to be unable to support commercial stocks, at least for now.
Climate change is also creating problems for red king crab due to temperature changes in its habitat and ocean acidification inhibiting shell growth. A booming population of sockeye salmon, which feed on crab larvae, is also having an impact.
Meanwhile, in Eastern Canada, snow crab stocks are bountiful, with robust catches being greeted by higher demand in the U.S., which imports the vast majority of Canadian snow crab. Thus far in 2023, the U.S. has imported 51,600 metric tons (MT) worth USD 660.2 million (EUR 608.6 million), blowing away the previous all-time annual record of 46,295 MT, set in 2009.
Norway’s snow crab harvests have also increased, as have its exports, reaching 3,100 MT valued at USD 33.9 million (EUR 31.2 million) for 2023. And its king crab exports to the U.S. reached 196,000 kilograms valued at USD 10.5 million (EUR 9.6 million) in 2023 after the quota was expanded in 2023. However, Norway’s Institute of Marine Research’s Quota Council has recommended decreasing the king crab quota for 2024 to 966 MT, down from 2,375 MT.
Snow crab and king crab have remained popular in the U.S. especially as prices deflated from their pandemic-era highs. Snow crab were “one of the primary drivers of the retail sales trend improvement” for shellfish category over the past six months, according to a Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute Sector report.
But traditional buyers of Alaskan crab, if they face trouble finding U.S. product, could switch to these alternatives, according to Kruse.
“If you turn off the spigot and have no crab to catch, that’s going to be replaced by something else, and probably snow crab from someplace else in the world,” he said.
While the other big global supplier of snow and king crab, Russia, has largely shifted its exports to China and South Korea, there are fears in the U.S. industry that some Russian product is still coming into the U.S., despite a ban put in place by U.S. President Joe Biden in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Trident Seafoods CEO Joe Bundrant wrote in a recent letter posted on his company’s website that Russian seafood harvesters have been able to circumvent the ban by shifting their processing to other countries, including China.
“The result is fueling Russia’s war and inhumane working conditions in China while also forcing responsible seafood producers to compete globally against a freefall in Russian seafood pricing. Meanwhile, U.S. seafood has been completely banned from Russia since 2014, and seafood exports to China have been subject to a 25 percent retaliatory tariff since 2018,” he wrote. “This unfair trade advantage, combined with so little transparency that consumers can’t discern Alaskan from Russian-harvested seafood, puts U.S. seafood producers at a huge disadvantage in U.S. and international markets, compounding already daunting challenges to the long-term competitiveness and viability of U.S. seafood production.”
Bundrant asked for help from the U.S. government to address the issue.
“Without more support from the U.S. federal government to help address unfair trade, modernize our supply chains, and reinvest in our communities, every link in our seafood supply chain – from independent fishermen to distributors – faces an uncertain future,” he said. “Being the most sustainable and responsible seafood producers in the world will mean little if we can’t stay in business. We need the U.S. government and the European Union Commission to step up and help ensure that we are competing on a level playing field.”
Photo courtesy of StopperOhana/Shutterstock
