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Fish Factor: Seafood Trade Troubles By LAINE WELCH -  Seafood coming from and going to China is piling up in freezer vans and cold storages indefinitely as the coronavirus continues to cause commerce chaos around the world.  

About 80% of trade of the world’s goods by volume is carried by sea and China is home to seven of the world's 10 busiest container ports, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Virus precautions mean that many ships can't get into Chinese ports, others are stuck at docks waiting for workers to return, and still more are idling in "floating quarantined zones," as countries refuse to allow crews of ships that have docked at Chinese ports to leave the boat until they have been declared virus-free.

China is the number one trade partner for the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma where ships are typically stacked with containers arriving full of goods ranging from clothing and toys to electronics. Many would normally return to China laden with Alaska seafood and other U.S. products, but operations have slowed dramatically.

“Factories aren’t open and goods aren’t being made. We don’t know yet what that impact is going to be,” Peter McGraw of Northwest Seaport Alliance told KOMO news. “There have been a lot of blank sailings. That means a lot of canceled ships.” 

Alaska seafood exports to China of nearly $1 billion include products for their own markets, but the bulk goes there for reprocessing and shipment back to the U.S. and other countries.  

“If you have plants that have product coming in and no workers to fill it, you're going to get that overflowing cold storage situation. So it's definitely a problem on the reprocessing side. On the consumption side, if people aren't going out to eat and going out to the market to buy seafood, that's going to take consumption down as well. So there's a couple different ways that it's working against moving seafood through the supply chain,”said Andy Wink, director of the Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association and an economist who has tracked world salmon markets for over a decade. 

The situation also is diverting more seafood from elsewhere into the U.S.

 “The big salmon farming companies are looking elsewhere to direct their products and the U.S. is the obvious choice,” he added. “So we've seen salmon prices on average down about 10% since the first of the year at the wholesale level.”   

As the crisis builds potentially into the spring, many major fisheries with year-round selling seasons but shorter harvests, such as Alaska salmon, begin engaging in price negotiations and set dock prices, said market expert John Sackton of Seafoodnews.com.  

“The price setting at the dock is based on packers’ and distributors’ expectations of price for the entire year, the supply and availability of what is landed, and the costs and business expectations of the harvesters,” Sackton wrote in his Winding Glass blog. “Regardless of what price is paid in May or June, packers are looking at what price they expect to get four, five or six months into the future.  In normal years, this is fraught with risk…This year, the risk is off the charts, because we simply don’t know how severe, economically or socially, the disruption from this disease may get.”

Alaska has worked hard to diversify its seafood markets beyond China since trade tariffs imposed in 2018 by the Trump administration cut into sales with its top customer. But the virus scare is causing disruption throughout new and more established sales regions, said Hannah Lindoff, global marketing director for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute. 

 “We have on the ground representatives conducting marketing activities to help raise the value of Alaska seafood products. However, due to travel bans and health concerns, several chef seminars in China designed to boost knowledge of different Alaska species planned for this month have been cancelled. Additionally, events in Singapore and Italy were also cancelled. ASMI continues to prioritize the health of our overseas representatives and partners in these regions and hope for positive news,” Lindoff said in an email message.

Air cargo operations have been differently affected, and “the cancellation of flights in and out of China has been so extensive that freight forwarders have had a very hard time finding any space at all on planes for their shipments,” according to the New York Times .

U.S. shoppers could see items missing from store shelves as early as mid-April, Edward Kelly of Wells Fargo Securities told the Los Angeles Times.  Big-box retailers such as Walmart and Target “could be the first to experience out-of-stock issues,” Kelly said. Of note: 80% of the drugs that Americans depend upon come from overseas countries, and China is the largest manufacturer. - More...
Saturday PM - February 29, 2020

Ketchikan: State unresponsive to Ketchikan's concerns on Tongass Highway conditions By LARRY JACKSON - While Alaska Department of Transportation workers patch and fill, a long term highway fix is years away. The Ketchikan City Mayor talks about his conversations with state DOT officials but gets no commitment on repairs. - More...
Saturday PM - February 29, 2020

Ketchikan: Baleen Brewery moving downtown By LARRY JACKSON - Friday I talked with Alex Macgullivray about his plans to move Baleen Brewery into the downtown area of Ketchikan. - More...
Saturday PM - February 29, 2020

Ketchikan: Commercial geoduck and oyster industry threatened by Governor's budget cuts By LARRY JACKSON - Southeast Alaska Dive Fishery Association opposes the Governor's budget which would impose large fees for PSP testing at state lab. Phil Doherty and geoduck diver Jeremy Leighton continue to sound the alarm. The Alaska Shellfish Growers Association voices alarm as well. - More...
Saturday PM - February 29, 2020

Ketchikan: Mayor Talks Ketchikan Port RFP Part 1 By LARRY JACKSON - Ketchikan City Mayor Bob Sivertsen explains some of the issues surrounding the Ketchikan public port expansion and RFP. This interview was long and you can catch part 2 where the mayor outlines some other issues at a later date.

In an effort to get a broad view of this issue, plans are to interview other proposers as well as council members and citizens. - More...
Saturday PM - February 29, 2020

Ketchikan: Landslide Causes Extensive Damage By LARRY JACKSON - Tatsuda's IGA on Stedman was hit by a substantial rock fall this week. Reports suggest the buidling suffered extensive damage. Owner Bill Tatsuda implied that the damage may put the store out of business after over 100 years. - More...
Saturday PM - February 29, 2020

Alaska: Vote Yes For Alaska’s Fair Share will be on the ballot - Vote Yes for Alaska’s Fair Share  will be giving Alaskans a chance to fix the budget crisis.  On February 26, the Alaska Division of Elections (ADOE) posted that more than enough signatures have been qualified to meet the requirements for the initiative petition to be on the ballot in 2020.

"As Gov. Dunleavy and the Alaska Legislature prepare to spend the last of the savings we built up under ACES, it is imperative that we end the SB-21 corporate welfare that has destroyed Alaska's finances and is harming the Alaska economy. Alaskans are doing the job that our elected officials are supposed to be doing," said Merrick Peirce, co-sponsor.

"We are just giving away our oil, $744 million per year through $8 per barrel credits for production from Prudhoe Bay alone, even though the producers have a legal duty to produce the oil under their leases, have been producing the oil for over three decades with no subsidy, and are making over $40 per barrel in net income (which is over twice as much as they make anywhere else in the world). We are getting nothing for giving away our oil--revenue, investment, production, and jobs are all down. We need to get our fair share and keep it in Alaska so we can save Alaskan jobs and more fully fund essential services, PFDs, and capital budgets," added Robin Brena co-sponsor.  - More...
Saturday PM - February 29, 2020

Alaska: Man Sentenced to 40 Years for Sexual Abuse of a Minor - On February 28, 2020, Superior Court Judge Michael Wolverton sentenced Jeremy Strunk to serve 40 years on multiple counts of Sexual Abuse of a Minor in the First Degree.

According to Assistant District Attorney Betsy Bull, who prosecuted the case, the evidence established that Strunk sexually abused three minor victims over the course of a decade.  Authorities arrested Strunk in 2018 as part of “Operation Broken Heart,” which was a nation-wide investigation that led to more than 2,300 arrests. 

Following Strunk’s arrest, Anchorage Police Department detectives learned that there were at least two additional victims.   ADA Bull asked the court to accept the parties’ agreed-upon sentence of 50 years with 10 years suspended in order to isolate Strunk from society so that he cannot continue to commit these crimes. - More..

Alaska: Winners of the Alaska Symphony of Seafood Unveiled - During an evening celebration of the best of Alaska Seafood co-hosted with United Fishermen of Alaska, the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation (AFDF) announced the winners of the Alaska Symphony of Seafood during the Awards Ceremony on Monday, February 24th, where contestants, industry representatives, Alaska Legislators, media and public attendees gathered to celebrate and toast the winners.

The Symphony is an annual contest for new value-added products made from Alaska seafood. The goal of the Alaska Symphony of Seafood is to increase the value of Alaska’s seafood by encouraging product development which diversifies markets, utilizes more of the resources and reduces fish waste. - More...
Saturday PM - February 29, 2020

The recent fall of the upper Yukon River
By NED ROZELL
Canoeists take to the Yukon River as it flows past the bluff just downstream from Eagle, Alaska, in summer 2019.
Photo By NED ROZELL

Alaska: The recent fall of the upper Yukon River By NED ROZELL - While skiing with two friends on the frozen Yukon River a few weeks ago, I visited the eight people who live between the towns of Eagle and Circle, which are 160 river miles apart.

The adults in those three households all shared the same observation: The Yukon River’s average level has dropped recently. They all mentioned “river piracy” that happened in an unseen high valley, 500 miles away, as a probable cause.

These people are among the keenest observers of the river as it enters Alaska.

They fish for salmon with nets and fishwheels, they drive boats up and down the big river, they walk its muddy banks, and they hold their breath during spring flood season.

Though the river people’s views of a shrinking river are not based on hard data, professional hydrologists agree with them.

The Yukon River measured at Eagle had its lowest annual water flow on record in 2019, with low levels also in 2017 and 2018, according to Crane Johnson, who works for the Alaska-Pacific River Forecast Center in Anchorage.

Johnson also shared a paper on river piracy by a scientist who traveled north to study a Yukon tributary in 2016 and found it was barely flowing. Further investigation by Dan Shugar and two colleagues from Illinois and British Columbia made them believe they were catching river piracy in the act.

River piracy happens when one large drainage somehow steals the water of another. In this case, melting of massive Kaskawulsh Glacier, in the St. Elias Mountains of the southwest Yukon territory, rerouted most of the water flowing into Slims River. That water instead now runs into the Kaskawulsh River.

This redirection of water affects the Yukon River because Slims River, named by a prospector in 1903 after his horse drowned in it, flowed into Kluane Lake, in between Haines Junction and the Alaska border at Beaver Creek. Kluane Lake flows into the Yukon River through the Kluane River.

Until 2016, a good deal of meltwater from Kaskawulsh Glacier (at 15,000 square miles larger than Massachusetts and Connecticut combined) flowed into the Yukon River and on to the Bering Sea. That water now mostly flows into the Alsek River and the Gulf of Alaska, taking a drastic shortcut to salt water. - More...
Saturday PM - February 29, 2020

Analysis: How one man fought South Carolina Democrats to end whites-only primaries – and why that matters now By BOBBY J. DONALDSON - A rusting chain-link fence represents a “color line” for the dead in Columbia, South Carolina. In Randolph Cemetery, separated by the barrier from the well-manicured lawn of the neighboring white graveyard, lies the remains of George A. Elmore.

A black business owner and civil rights activist, Elmore is little remembered despite his achievement. But a granite monument at his grave attests to the “unmatched courage, perseverance and personal sacrifice” that saw him take on the South Carolina Democratic Party of the 1940s over its whites-only primaries – and win.

Nearly 75 years after Elmore’s battle, the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates made fervent appeals to African American voters in South Carolina ahead of the primary being held on Feb. 29. For some of the all white front-runners in the race, it could be a make-or-break moment – a failure to win over sufficient black support would be a major setback, potentially campaign-ending.

It is a far cry from the South Carolina of August 1946, when Elmore, a fair-skinned, straight-haired manager of a neighborhood five-and-dime store, consulted with local civil rights leaders and agreed to try once again to register to vote.

It followed blatant attempts to deprive African American citizens of their constitutional rights by white Democratic Party officials who would move voter registration books from store to store and hide them the moment a black voter entered.

When a clerk mistakenly allowed Elmore to register – thinking he was white, contemporary sources suggest – NAACP activists had a plaintiff to challenge the last whites-only primary in the nation.

Excluding black voters at the ballot had already been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1944’s Smith v. Allwright decision. But in defiance, the South Carolina General Assembly simply redefined the state’s Democratic Party as a private club not subject to laws regulating primaries. Gov. Olin D. Johnston declared: “White supremacy will be maintained in our primaries. Let the chips fall where they may.”

Elmore’s name was promptly purged from the rolls and a cadre of prominent civil rights activists arranged for the NAACP to plead his case.

Columbia civil rights attorney Harold Boulware filed the federal lawsuit. In June 1947, Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter – like Boulware, graduates of the Howard University School of Law – argued Elmore’s case as a class lawsuit covering all African Americans in the state of voting age. The trial inspired a packed gallery of African American observers, including a young Matthew J. Perry Jr., a future federal district judge, who commented: “Marshall and Carter were hitting it where it should be hit.”- More...
Saturday PM - February 29, 2020

MONEY MATTERS: WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THE STOCK MARKET NOW? WHAT DO I DO? By MARY LYNNE DAHL, Certified Financial Planner® - This week, as of February 29, 2020, we have seen a sharp decline in stock market prices, over 4,000 points, making this drop officially a “correction” of 14%. Foreign markets are in a sharp decline also, and there is a reason for this.

The reasons for this market drop in share prices is that the market likes the certainty of knowing a lot of data, like the earnings of companies, their profits and losses, taxes, hiring and firing, growth and recession indicators and other kinds of data that companies use to plan ahead. No successful company operates by the seat of the pants, at least not for long, and the market knows this. So it likes the certainty of knowing these things. What it does NOT like is uncertainty. There are risks associated with uncertainty that are hard to deal with because they are unexpected.

The uncertainty that worries the market the most right now is COVID 19, the coronavirus that is being called a pandemic, worldwide. It is an unknown, a real risk to health, but also a real risk to businesses all over the world. China has been economically hurt already, with factories shut down for weeks. China is the world ‘s main factory today. Almost everything is made there. All of the widgets for almost any kind of product come from China. It is a vital link in the supply chain of virtually every type of product that someone manufacture, sells, buys and trades. When the economy of China is hit hard with bad economic conditions, the effect ripples across the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, the virus is moving around the globe rapidly. In the US, we are fortunate enough to have a great system of medical care, with a lot of resources to deal with a virus like COVID 19, but that does not mean it not a threat to us also, so our own economy is now asking some important questions about preparation for it, treatment of it and the effects of it on business and life in general in the US. It is concerning, to be sure, and that concern, coupled with the risks to business, is causing a lot of uncertainty.

And this is exactly what makes our markets unhappy. Uncertainty is the bane of stock markets.

So, should you do something? React to all of this? - More...
Saturday PM - February 29, 2020

Political Cartoon: Wall Street COVID-19
By Dave Granlund ©2020, PoliticalCartoons.com
Distributed to paid subscribers for publication by Cagle Cartoons, Inc.