Salmon Resources

Introduction

Salmon resources are produced by commercial fisheries, marine and freshwater aquaculture (farming), and propagation (sea ranching: juvenile release from the hatchery in their natal stream and adult catches in their natal area several years later). The salmon commercial fishery used to consist of free catches from fishing vessels using drift net or longline fishing in the North Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. An exclusive economic zone (EEZ) extending 200 nautical miles from the coast was prescribed by the 1982 United Nations Conservation on the Law of Sea for the special right to explore and use marine resources. Since then, an intergovernmental organization, the North Atlantic Salmon Conservation Organization (NASCO), was established in 1983 to create a large protected zone free of targeted fisheries for Atlantic salmon in most areas beyond 12 nautical miles from the coast by Canada, Denmark (with respect to the Faroe Islands & Greenland), the European Union, Norway, the Russian Federation, and the United States of America. The North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission (NPAFC) was established in 1993 to promote the conservation of anadromous stocks of Pacific salmon in the convention area including the international waters of the North Pacific Ocean and its adjacent seas north of 33º North beyond the 200-mile EEZ of the coastal seas of Canada, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation, and the United States of America.

Almost all commercial fishery production of salmon consists of Pacific salmon because the capture of Atlantic salmon has only been a few thousand tons in recent years. The catch of Pacific salmon was approximately 0.4 million tons with small yearly fluctuations until the 1970s, and it then increased up to one million tons with large yearly fluctuations in recent years, mainly in the United States of America (USA), the Russian Federation (USSR until 1987), Japan, and Canada (Figure 1A). The largest commercial salmon fishery production is observed for pink salmon, with large differences in odd and even years; the second largest is for chum salmon; the third largest is for sockeye salmon; and the fourth largest is for coho salmon (Figure 1B). Commercial salmon fishery production includes salmon propagation systems in each country.

Figure 1.

Annual changes in the Pacific salmon fishery production of different countries (A) and species (B) from 1950 to 2016. Data source: FishStatJ of FAO (2018a), figure produced by Dr. Ikutaro Shimizu.

Total salmon aquaculture production has been 3.6 million tons in recent years. Salmon marine aquaculture (mariculture) production has reached 3 million tons, mainly in Norway and Chile, with some production also coming from Iran, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Faroe Islands, Australia, and Denmark (Figure 2A). The largest marine aquaculture species is Atlantic salmon, the second largest is steelhead (so-called Salmon trout), the third largest is coho salmon, and the fourth largest is Chinook salmon (Figure 2B). Recently, salmon freshwater aquaculture production has reached approximately 0.6 million tons in Iran, Turkey, France, Italy, Denmark, the USA, Germany, Spain, Japan, Chile, and China (Figure 3A). The main freshwater aquacultured species are rainbow trout and, to a lesser extent, Atlantic salmon (Figure 3B).

The total production of salmon is now 4.6 million tons, 22% of which comes from commercial fishery production and 78% from aquaculture production. Salmon aquaculture is the fastest growing food production system in the world, showing over 30-fold growth over 30 years due to improvements in formulated feeds, the biological understanding of farmed salmon, and the demand for seafood products. However, salmon aquaculture has been subject to many concerns regarding environmental and social impacts, such as water pollution, genetic interaction of nonnative species with wild fish, escapes, the spread of diseases, and unfair labor practices at salmon farms.