US Salmon Sent to China For Filleting [View All]

[otohara]

Pacific salmon swim as far as 2,000 miles to lay their eggs in rivers up and down the Northwest. Once caught, some make a longer journey: 8,000 miles round-trip to China.

Facing growing imports of low-cost seafood, fish processors in the Northwest, including Seattle-based Trident Seafoods, are sending part of their catch of Alaskan salmon or Dungeness crab to China to be filleted or de-shelled before returning to U.S. tables.

"There are 36 pin bones in a salmon and the best way to remove them is by hand," says Charles Bundrant, founder of Trident, which ships about 30 million pounds of its 1.2 billion-pound annual harvest to China for processing. "Something that would cost us $1 per pound labor here, they get it done for 20 cents in China."

Trident and other companies that use Chinese labor say it is a way to protect a Northwest industry under threat from farmed seafood produced by nations such as China, Thailand, Vietnam and Chile.

Imports accounted for 78 percent of the 4.7 billion pounds of seafood Americans consumed last year, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Alaska and Washington have each lost about one-fifth of their processing jobs over the past decade. In Washington, average monthly employment in the industry fell to 6,434 in 2004 from 8,668 in 1994, says Rick Lockhart, a state economist. Alaska's employment dropped to 8,500 last year from 10,400 in 1995, according to the Web site of the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development.
The industry's big fish


Three of the top four seafood suppliers in the U.S. are privately owned companies based on the West Coast, according to SeaFood Business magazine's 2004 sales rankings.

1. Trident Seafoods (Seattle) $800 million

2. Red Chamber Group (Vernon, Calif.) $793 million

3. (tie) Pacific Seafood Group (Clackamas, Ore.) $700 million

ConAgra's Louis Kemp unit (Omaha, Neb.) $700 million

Source: SeaFood Business

"It's a dying industry in the U.S.," says Tony Neves, senior vice president of Vernon, Calif.-based Red Chamber, the second-biggest U.S. seafood company. "It's a sad reality, but it's a fact."

Clackamas, Ore.-based Pacific Seafood Group, the third-biggest U.S. seafood company, started a trial six months ago to process Dungeness crabs in Qingdao, China. The crab, found from the Aleutian Islands off Alaska to south of San Francisco, is named after the town in Washington where it was first harvested commercially.

Crab shakers in Qingdao get $100 to $150 a month to extract meat from crab shells with pincers — one-tenth what it might cost in the U.S., says John Lin, who oversees new-product development at Pacific's headquarters.

"Because labor is so much more affordable, they can spend more time to take the crab meat out" in China, Lin says. "There's a higher recovery rate."http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002384544_uschinafish16.html