While Alaska does continue to hold its own as the No. 1 fishing state in the Nation, employment in the crab fishery industry has dropped by a substantial amount because its fisheries for crab are privatized, according to economists in the state. So while salmon fisheries are providing an abundant resource for jobs, the crab fishing industry is not doing as well.
According to a report that was released in the November 2008 issue of the Alaska Economic Trends, which is published by the Department of Labor in the state, the overall harvest for seafood in Alaska was the third highest since statehood in 2007, as well as the sixth largest by volume. Despite a depressed salmon market not only in 1998 but also between 2000 and 2003, Alaskan fisheries have been able to recover in more recent years. Alaska experienced record harvest values both in 2006 and 2007 with $1.3 billion and $1.5 billion dollars respectively. The value of Alaska's harvest in 2007 was 3.6 times larger in value that the harvest in Massachusetts, which is the No. 2 fishing state in the country.
For the 2007 year, all complete figures have been made available, and the average monthly fish harvesting job count totaled 7,260. At the peak of the summer in 2007, the monthly job count rose sharply to 20,137. If you add in the thousands of jobs that these fisheries are creating in sea food processing, government management, support service industries and other industries and the economic importance between fisheries and Alaska becomes even more clear than before, according to economists.
While employment in the sablefish, salmon and halibut fisheries were down slightly from previous figures, the drop in jobs was most dramatic when it came to the crab fleet, only responsible for generating a total of 418 new jobs in the year 2007, which was a decline by 40 percent from 692 which was recorded in the year 2002.
Economists have said that one of the reasons that are to blame for the decline is the crab rationalization program which was implemented in the Bering Sea and the Aleutian islands in 2005. These areas are home to the state's largest crab fishery in terms of volume and may be one of the largest contributing factors to the decline. Between 2003 and 2007, the crab employment numbers in those areas alone fell by as much as 34 percent, and the peak month employment fell to 584 in 2007 from 1,694 in 2003, which is a total overall drop of 65 percent according to economists in the state. As intended, the crab rationalization program has reduced fleet size and managed to distribute share quotas more efficiently to fishermen in the area based on their harvest history and harvest quota on an annual basis.
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