Salmon stock variability and the political economy of the Pacific Salmon Treaty

I. INTRODUCTION Despite long standing efforts to preserve and enhance West Coast salmon stocks and to forge workable international agreements governing harvests, the Pacific salmon fishery is in a state of crisis. Runs of many salmon stocks spawning in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and California rivers have declined precipitously in recent years. At the same time, Alaska's salmon harvests have experienced a remarkable sustained increase. These trends may have fueled disputes between the United States and Canada and between Alaska and other U.S. interests regarding harvest management under the Pacific Salmon Treaty. Since 1993, Canadian and U.S. representatives on the Pacific Salmon Commission have been unable to agree on harvest allocations. The Canadian delegation broke off negotiations in early 1994, charging that the United States had failed to support an equitable division of the catch. Soon afterwards, the Canadian government imposed a substantial fee on U.S. fishing vessels using the Inside Passage to travel from Washington ports to fishing grounds in Alaska and urged Canadian harvesters to fish aggressively along the west coast of Vancouver Island and in the Strait of Juan de Fuca in order to intercept Fraser River sockeye before they entered U.S. waters. In 1994, the Canadians also continued to harvest fragile coho and chinook stocks heading south to spawn in U.S. rivers despite the fact that conservation concerns had led Washington and Oregon to close their own offshore coho and chinook fish-eries. These actions had the intended re-suit of riveting attention to on-going problems with establishing and enforcing harvest allocations under the Treaty. Negotiations have been going on at a government-to-government level ever since. The parties agreed to mutual reductions in harvests of Fraser River sockeye and southern coho in 1995 but reached no agreement on other stocks. The Commissioners' inability to agree on allocation of most stocks covered by the Treaty has allowed each jurisdiction to promulgate its own set of regulations under which fishing has proceeded. In 1995, this non-cooperative arrangement caused tensions among the U.S. interests to boil over. Northwest treaty tribes and the states of Washington and Oregon filed suit against Alaska in the U.S. District Court in Seattle. On August 11, the federal judge issued an injunction against further commercial harvest of chinook salmon in southeastern Alaska. The injunction remained in effect through the remainder of the 1995 fishing season. This paper examines the role of environmental variability in contributing to the current crisis. Specifically, changes in the marine environment during the past two decades are widely believed to have damaged west coast salmon populations while enhancing the productivity of Alaskan stocks. A general pattern of warmer sea-surface temperatures along the entire coast, intensified winter storminess in the Gulf of Alaska, and warmer winter and spring conditions over Alaska appear to be associated with an increased frequency of El Nino conditions in the tropical Pacific. While such climatic changes provide a convenient explanation for the divergent north/south trends in salmon harvests, their role is neither simple nor easy to disentangle from the influences of other factors that affect salmon survival and growth, including dams, water diversions, habitat degradation, hatcheries, and fishery management strategies. Given the anadromous life cycle of the salmon, conditions both in the streams and in the ocean can affect the success of a cohort. The true sources of fluctuating salmon runs thus remain difficult to pin down. Both resource variability itself and the difficulty of identifying the true sources of variability complicate the task of resource management. This paper addresses the following questions: (i) What role have the recent trends in salmon populations played in the breakdown of U.S./Canadian cooperation under the Pacific Salmon Treaty? …