The Alaska House Special Committee on Fisheries will hold a hearing Wednesday on salmon management in the Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim region of Western Alaska.
The hearing is set for 2:30 p.m. at the Dena'ina Civic and Convention Center in downtown Anchorage.
The committee will hear from the state Department of Fish and Game, village councils and commercial industries, and will take public testimony, says this committee press release.
People in the huge AYK region have long depended on salmon fisheries, the release says.
"Over the past 10 years, there have been declines in the salmon returns to Western Alaska, which has led to severe restrictions on commercial and subsistence fisheries, as well as state and federal disaster declarations."
The hearing coincides with the huge Alaska Federation of Natives convention, which begins Thursday in Anchorage.
It's about time this Salmon Crisis is address by those in leadership roles in our state. Norton Sound and especially the Nome area rivers have had subsistence restrictions for 20 years! Fish counting projects are funded by the CDQ program in the Norton Sound so we know who is in control of those "escapement numbers". That needs to change. Hopefully people will testify to that today.
ReplyDeleteThe AYK has always been shafted by the DF&G with a nickle and dime operation. Obvious, the region does not bring in loads of cash and many of those in the region are poor. What do they matter? No money, no interest.
ReplyDeleteFor over a century, the resource needs of the villages of Western Alaska have always got what is left after the major fisheries got what they needed.
ReplyDeleteToday whether it is False Pass drifter catching Chinook salmon, seiners and drifters catching chums, trawlers catching both Chinook and chums, the total is in the millions of fish over the last three decades.
This may be hundreds of millions of dollars removed from these village economies. Not faulting these other fisheries for wanting to fish for their own benefit, but the villages of Western Alaska has paid an unbelievable price. When a fish destined for Western Alaska is caught, nobody sends check to those villages, but they would have had a check for these fish, if they had not been intercepted.
Not right or wrong, but these are the facts.
The incredible irony of this is that now the Yukon summer chums have rebuilt to record numbers, the villages cannot take advantage of this critical resource because the byctach for Chinook is essentially zero.
Fucked again.
Every intercept fishery gets a bycatch of Yukon Chinook, except the Yukon.
This majestic Yukon Chinook was the backbone of the Yukon economy, and has been decimated, and now the chums cannot be harvested, and are under pressure from intercept fisheries.
The poor remain poor, and the rich get richer, and all the politicians make excuses as to who is to blame for this unfairness.
It is simple, this unfairness is the fault of politicians, as they are bent to those who have money and power.
One could blame the intercept fisheries, but the root cause of this theft of historical fishing rights, is squarely on the shoulders of politicians.
Economic genocide, is what this is.
This past summer state and federal managers allowed Lower Yukon commercial fisherman directed chum fishing. Approximately 4500 kings were reported as bycatch plus probably another 3000 not reported, plus probably another some 2000 - 6000 kings dropping out of chum gillnet gear. So it all added up to a lot of collateral damage of Yukon King to try and keep their management office in Emmonak from getting firebombed. There were no commercial king openings again this year.
ReplyDeleteThe destruction of the Yukon River king salmon run is a crime against humanity.
ReplyDeleteA 60,000 hard cap in the BSAI pollock trawl fisheries? 25,000 in the GOA? Give me a break.
You are absolutely right about the unreported take of kings in inriver commercial fisheries and that should be reduced but what needs to be stopped is the bycatch by the trawlers. The burden of conservation should not fall so heavily on the people who have depended on the salmon for centuries.