Sockeye salmon. (Photo Credit: J Armstrong / UW)

National parks to review guidelines on Alaska salmon

UNITED STATES
Tuesday, July 30, 2013, 04:10 (GMT + 9)

Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski has convinced National Park Service (NPS) Director to allow concessionaires serve Alaskan salmon in national parks menus nationwide.

"In an occasionally tense questioning of the National Park Service Director today Senator Lisa Murkowski convinced him in his public comments to revise the agency’s guidelines and take steps to allow wild Alaskan salmon and other wild Alaska seafood back on the concession stands of national parks nationwide," the senator's office reported last Thursday.

The National Park director, Jonathan Jarvis, initially wanted park concessions to serve only wild sustainable salmon certified as 'sustainable' by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC).

But he told the senator that the NPS guidelines were not policies or laws, rather recommendations but that he was willing to change the guidelines so it can include Alaska wild caught fish.

The salmon in question refers especially to Copper River salmon, which looks sustainable but isn’t always wild, according to Alaska Dispatch.

The point seems to be what exactly constitutes a ‘sustainable’ source.

Some conservationist groups have put into doubt Alaska’s huge dump of hatchery fish in the North Pacific every year. They also oppose the consequences that brings to the environment. This meant that some of Alaska’s fish processing companies have had problems getting an international certification as ‘sustainable’ and have abandoned the idea of obtaining one.

The Copper River run gets a big input of salmon from a hatchery near Gulkana.

"The 2011 sockeye salmon harvest of 2.0 million fish was almost double the previous 10-year harvest average of 1.14 million sockeye salmon," reported the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. "The preliminary harvest composition was 1.4 million (69 percent) wild, 612,000 (30 percent) Gulkana Hatchery, and 6,000 (3 percent) Main Bay Hatchery sockeye salmon."

Despite the fact that a big quota of this salmon comes from hatcheries, it is still being labelled as ‘Copper river red salmon’ and also ‘wild Copper River red salmon’.

Twenty to fifty per cent of all Alaskan salmon caught for commercial purposes now come from hatcheries.

Murkowski and Jarvis will meet again to discuss NPS procedures and the unnecessary and harmful impact this has on Alaskan fisheries.

Related article:

- Wal-Mart asked to rethink salmon resolution

By Gabriela Raffaele
[email protected]
www.seafood.media

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