KODIAK — Alaska's millions of pounds of seafood are a drop in the bucket on a global scale, but fishermen can go to the bank with the economic potential for this tasty, nutritious resource, says seafood marketing specialist Quentin Fong.
As food markets consolidated and producers continue to grow more and more farmed fish, from tilapia to Vietnamese catfish, the lack of availability of wild caught fish will make Alaska's harvests from the sea more special, Fong told participants in ComFish 2010 on April 13. Of all farmed fish, the growth in imports of frozen fillets of tilapia has been most dramatic, now totaling millions of metric tons annually.
"We are entering more into a niche market type of production," said Fong, who is on the staff of the Alaska Sea Grant Advisory Program. Using a series of colorful graphs, Fong pointed to statistics showing that overall global harvests of wild seafood remained relatively constant, while the percentage of farmed product continued to grow.
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