Economics

Anglers fish for salmon with rod and reel, usually using flies as bait. Commercial fishing for salmon is done on a much larger scale, employing traps and pound nets to catch the fish on the way to their spawning grounds. The salmon fishing industry is one of the major industries of the American Pacific coast, providing 60,000 jobs and more than $1 billion in income per year for the region.

The annual harvest of wild and farm-raised salmon in the United States averages about 478,000 metric tons, of which about 60 percent is canned.

2. Economic Value
The total ex-vessel value from the commercial fisheries in 2007 is estimated to be $USD 818 million (Table 1). The first wholesale value in 2007 is estimated to be $USD 2.2 billion. Harvesting  and processing jobs are estimated to be 35 thousand in 2007. Of the total $USD 3.0 billion personal income generated from the salmon fishing industry in 2007, 43 percent was in the U.S., 32  percent in Russia, and 23 percent in Japan. The other Pacific salmon countries of Canada and Korea had two percent of the summed economic contribution (Figure 5)

3. Markets
Salmon is a commodity exchanged worldwide. In recent years, capture salmon only represents about 40 percent of worldwide production, with farmed salmon production overtaking the  market share in about 1997 (see Appendix Table A-2). Aquaculture products are readily available in an integrated market and compete with any products from capture production.14  This has forced capture fishery production prices into a “take” position with aquaculture production prices (see Figure 8).15 […]

From 2009 North Pacific Salmon Fisheries Economic Measurement Estimates