Over its lifetime, an Alaskan pink salmon can swim nearly 1,000 miles. Thanks to modern fishing supply chains, it might travel some 10,000 miles more after its death. 

From the hold of a fishing boat in the Gulf of Alaska to a processing facility in Dalian, China, to a refrigerated container at the Port of Norfolk, and finally, to the seafood aisle at supermarkets from Walmart to Target, the trans-Pacific journey such fish take illustrates the extraordinary, and often counter-intuitive, nature of globalized food supply chains. 

This week, The Wire takes a look at how the fish we eat arrive in our stores — and how that may be changing following the Covid pandemic.

FISH FACTS

The U.S. imported 3 million metric tons of seafood in 2020, worth almost $21 billion, accounting for over 90 percent of the seafood Americans consume, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But by one estimate, approximately one-third of imported seafood was originally fished in U.S. waters.

Since the early 2000s, China has been one of the leading destinations for freshly-caught American fish, according to trade data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

And while much of this seafood is ultimately consumed in China, where consumers put a premium on high quality imported seafood, a significant portion is also sliced, filleted, packaged, and sent back to the United States. The U.S. exported 240,000 metric tons of seafood to China worth $700 million in 2020 and imported 400,000 metric tons, worth $1.6 billion.

The rapid growth of companies like Dalian Rich Enterprise Group Company, one of the largest salmon processing companies in China, illustrates how the supply chain has developed. 

The company is based out of Dalian, a city on China’s northeastern coast that is a popular destination for Alaskan exports and processes the fish for sale to Chinese and foreign customers in roughly equal proportion. Dalian Rich Enterprise is a major supplier for several major U.S. seafood trading companies, including High Liner Foods, Eastern Fish Company and Trident Seafood, which sell their products in American supermarkets, including Walmart, Sam’s Club, and Target.

It is often unclear where frozen fish sold in U.S. supermarkets was processed. Take the vacuum-packed sockeye salmon produced by High Liner Foods, the third largest seafood trader in North America. While this salmon is advertised as a “Product of USA” and a “Product of Alaska,” it is not certified as being “Buy American” compliant on the company’s website, indicating that the fish is likely processed outside the United States.

Dalian Rich Enterprise and High Liner Foods did not respond to requests for comment.

THE WAGE DIFFERENCE

How did the seafood supply chain end up this way? 

As with so many industries, labor costs have been key. The median hourly wage for seafood processing workers in the U.S. is $12.80, while average salaries stood at $30,000 in 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average Chinese fishery worker’s wage in 2019 was one-tenth of that.

This wage differential, combined with improvements in freezer technology in the freight industry, have made it much cheaper to ship freshly caught seafood to countries such as China and Indonesia for processing. 

Coastal development has also displaced many former fishing communities. “In places outside Alaska, there is significant real estate development pressure in areas where processing plants once stood,” says Paul Greenberg, author of American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood. 

“As a fishmonger in Gloucester, Massachusetts, once put it to me, ‘You see fish houses closing and getting converted into hotels and condos all the time. You never see a hotel getting converted into a fish house.’”

Together, these factors have decimated the U.S. seafood processing industry. In 1990, 4,000 processing plants handled the commercial products of America’s quarter million fishermen. In 2017, just 20 percent of those plants remained.

THE PANDEMIC EFFECT

There are signs of change to this fishy tale — thanks initially to the U.S.-China trade war, and more recently to the pandemic.

U.S. seafood imports from China peaked in 2015 before sharply declining beginning in 2018, the year the Trump administration imposed a 25 percent tariff on such shipments. Beijing slapped a 35 percent retaliatory tariff on U.S. seafood imports in 2019, further damaging the bilateral trade. From 2018 to 2020, U.S. seafood exports to China fell by 20 percent a year on average. The Trump administration later rolled back tariffs on imports of most fish species in 2020. 

The protracted effects of the pandemic may lead to more lasting change. Dan Lesh, a seafood industry analyst with McKinley Research Group, an Alaskan consultancy, says container shortages have caused the cost of shipping to as much as triple compared to the pre-pandemic era, while holdups at key ports such as Dalian have resulted in ships waiting at sea for up to seven months. 

Part of the holdup stems from Chinese concerns that frozen seafood might transmit Covid, a disputed theory that’s nevertheless shared by some senior Chinese officials. Imported food shipments are tested for Covid, and a positive result can result in a full port shutdown. The draconian testing regime has irked many of China’s trading partners.

Heightened fear about seafood hygiene has benefitted a niche sector of the U.S. fishing industry: Small businesses that fish and process their seafood in-house, sending their products directly to consumers’ doorsteps, have seen sales soar during the pandemic. According to Christopher Nicolson, co-founder of Iliamna Fishing Company, a family-owned cooperative that catches, processes, and distributes premium wild sockeye salmon, the company’s annual growth rate doubled in 2020. 

“Seafood has a funny way of freaking people out,” says Greenberg, the author of American Catch. “These direct-to-consumer businesses like Illiamna are able to offer a clean-looking, vacuum-sealed frozen product that feels safe. And the sense of doing business with real people rather than corporations was also appealing during these Covid-ian times.” 

But Lesh, the analyst, believes that the market for direct-to-consumer fish has a limit. “There’s a natural cap on the growth of that sector. It’s not a way you’re going to move commodities-grade fish.” 

The more likely trend, which has already begun, is that seafood processing will relocate to even cheaper labor markets, including Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. “What would really make reshoring happen is technology shifts in terms of automation capabilities and robotics,” says Lesh.

For now, the posthumous fish’s trans-Pacific journey seems fated to grow only longer.

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