On the Hook

Only a few years ago the salmon industry in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska was a booming, $100-million-a-year business. Now it is gasping and dying. Last week salmon fishermen estimated that sales in 1953 will drop to $55 million, and that this year's catch will be the second smallest in 40 years.

At emergency meetings from Seattle to Ketchikan, worried canners frankly placed the blame squarely where it belonged--on the industry itself. Said Vance Sutter, president of the Association of Pacific Fisheries: "We got out on a comfortable limb--shortsightedly and blithely. Now the limb's been sawed out from under us, and most of the time we wielded the saw."

Sutter's own Fidalgo Island Packing Co., which used to can more than 100,000 cases annually (value: as high as $2,500,000), will turn out only 45,000 cases this year, and Sutler wonders if even all of that number can be sold. He alone figures to lose $450,000, and the others--Pacific American Fisheries, Libby-McNeil & Libby, A.& P.'s Nakat Packing Corp., Del Monte Brand's Alaska Packers Association--have all been hit hard. The industry expects to lose close to $15 million. To top it all off, the Federal Trade Commission last month accused 43 packers and eleven labor unions of conspiring to fix prices. FTC also charged that negotiation of raw-fish prices between the unions and packers has resulted in exorbitant retail prices to consumers.

Production. The industry can trace its trouble back before World War II, when salmon was king of the market, selling almost 9,000,000 cases v. only about 3,000,000 cases of tuna, the nearest competitor. During the war, the demand, with the Government buying 80% of the catch, was always far ahead of supply. Temporarily sure of their market, the packers forgot about advertising, shrugged off climbing costs, left it up to the brokers who sold the catch to keep up consumer interest in salmon.

After OPA ceilings went off, prices shot up from $12 to $20 a case in 1947, and to $24 a year later. Packers' costs climbed even faster, about 488% since 1940. Fishermen who got an average of 8 1/2-c- apiece for their fish in 1940, raked in 50-c- in 1951. Pay rates in canneries rose nearly 80% an hour.

The first forecast of disaster came in 1946, when the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service reported that the salmon were disappearing; the catch was less than 4,000,000 cases, the smallest since 1927. This year the pack will drop to 2,800,000 cases, and 27 of the Northwest's 121 canneries have already gone out of business. Furthermore, low-cost tuna has inherited a large part of the market, outselling high-priced salmon.

Reproduction. At their meetings last week, the salmon packers planned to save their industry by a $1,000,000 advertising campaign in cooperation with other interested industries (i.e., U.S. Steel) and a widespread conservation program to bring back the salmon. The new rules call for 50% fewer nets and traps in 1954 in order to let more salmon escape to the breeding areas, more and better scientific research to help the salmon breed successfully, a Government-aided program such as the one that helped to build up the salmon runs in Canada's Fraser River (TIME, Sept. 23, 1946).

Meanwhile, canners will try to bargain down the price of raw fish. For this, the FTC price-fixing complaint may be a blessing in disguise. If the Government wins its case, fishermen will have to bargain individually for the price of their fish instead of having the union bargain for the entire fleet.

The powerful fishermen's unions plan a bitter fight to keep raw-fish prices at their current high levels, since a sizable drop would force hundreds of small fishermen out of business. Nevertheless, says the packers' President Sutter, "You just can't go on running a 3,000,000 pack industry with a work force geared to a 6,000,000 pack industry."

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