STORIES

Monday, June 18, 2007

State of the Salmon

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By Peter Morgan

I’ll start off by saying this is a review of a website we happened to notice the other day… just in case you’re wondering where we’re going with this.

Salmon, like other species of fish, know no political boundaries. It’s hard to craft detailed, meaningful policies for the survival and health of this fish that’s so important to northern Pacific countries for food and sport, and it’s part of the reason why some of the species are on the endangered list today when the coast teemed with their life only 50 years ago. But there are many other reasons as well.

When I was the editor of BC Business Magazine, back the the 1980s, we researched and wrote a cover story on the status of the salmon industry on the BC coast. There were two major points we wanted to make with that story: Firstly, to demonstrate that the salmon fishing industry was made up of several distinct economic groups — companies, unions, sports and tourism organizations, aboriginals and governments — all of which were about evenly matched, between the groups, in terms of authority and influence, and all of which had specific interests that often didn’t match those of the others.

For the industry as a whole to move — whether forward, sideways or backward — those various groups ganged up, collaborated or disparaged each other publicly and privately in a “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” way. And the resulting alliances were constantly shifting as the availability of salmon and their various runs fluctuated either naturally, or because of previous deals and side deals among the industry players about how some aspect of the fishery was to be handled. It was often hard to figure out whether the people who represented the groups at various tables were more interested in the politics or the fish.

And, secondly, the number of fishermen and their equipment were, at the time, sufficient to completely wipe out all of the Pacific salmon within a year if they were taken off quotas. Licence buyback plans since then have taken quite a bit of the capacity out of the BC fleet, but the industry is still composed of the same traditional groupings, and industrial technology has improved considerably since.

The State of the Salmon is an international consortium that is “dedicated to improving understanding of salmon status and trends across the North Pacific—and building a knowledge network that can inform salmon conservation and management decisions in the future.” Why international? Because Russia, Japan and China, as well as the US and Canada, have salmon fisheries—and policies that deal with economics, environment and sustainability.

Its web site is easy to understand, and well worth exploring. It’s guaranteed to increase your understanding of the issues confronting all of these north Pacific countries and their salmon stocks. The “Data & Maps” area is particularly useful; it features a variety of interactive maps that document existing salmon populations and their movements. The “Status & Trends” area provides updates on salmon population trends in Canada, Japan, Russia and the United States.

You may not get the ugly details of the politics on this site, but at least you’ll have some idea of the magnitude of the problem, and you’ll have at hand a list, from Canada, the US, Russia and China, about which species are endangered — and which are about to go that way.

In a decade or two from now, you’ll also be able to ask yourself whether the industry participants’ choices to focus on the politics or the fish was the right one. The fish, for different reasons, won’t care either way.

— Peter Morgan is editor and publisher of Morgan:News:2010, which reports daily on the business of the 2010 Winter Olympics. He is also a business-to-business marketing consultant who lives in Vancouver and sometimes reviews websites that interest him. You can reach him at .