News Summary July 27, 2026
The Winding Glass: What Alaska Has Lost
In a sweeping Winding Glass column, SeafoodNews editor John Sackton argues that what Alaska has lost over the past decade is not tonnage; it's redundancy, competition, and local ownership, with harvesters receiving 27 cents per pound in real terms in 2024 versus 40 cents in 2016, 33 processing plants closed, and four communities now operating with no fish plant at all. The companies that survived were long-horizon owners — Nissui, Maruha Nichiro, Pattison, CDQ groups — while private equity fled, and the federal deregulatory push now underway addresses none of the actual causes of the crisis. "Policy that rebuilds those will rebuild Alaska's fisheries," Sackton writes. "Policy that strips protection from a system already hanging by a single thread will finish the job the shocks started...
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