Now that the first snow has hit the ground we can turn our attention to the Southwest Alaska Economic Summit & Annual Membership Meeting, aka the SWAMC Conference. The 2012 event will be held February 16-17 at the always-dependable Hotel Captain Cook. The 2011 Conference explored new and emerging opportunities like broadband, energy technologies, greenhouses, and STEM education programs. Next year's meeting will build off of those and other regional topics while also focusing heavily on the economic core of Southwest Alaska, the commercial fishing sector. As a pleasant alternative to prior years, the 2012 SWAMC Conference will NOT overlap with the Alaska Municipal League, NPFMC meetings, the AK Forum on the Environment, or other important events. So in short, we plan to see you in February! Conference information and sponsorship opportunities will follow shortly. 

The following update is from SWAMC's project intern, Sam Tappen:  

Much progress has been made this month aggregating data for the industrial base section of the asset project. Most of this time has been devoted to researching trends in Southwest Alaska's seafood industry. Anyone who has  taken a look at the raw data for this sector knows that the numbers are not always easy to find or to analyze (see the indicator section below). Consequently, we have specifically tried to target subjects and information that would be most accessible and the best indicators of the industry's position. A different time frame (the past ten years) than most of SWAMC's other studies has been applied to get a better outlook of the short-term trends of Southwest's fisheries and its response to the current economic downturn.

This chart shows the estimated gross earnings of all fisheries in the region by borough and census area. As evidenced, five of the six areas earned more in the past year than their ten year gross average. This is mostly due to an increase in prices rather than catch totals. Many producers have found ways to increase the per pound value of their catch in the past decade. This has been the result of a number of initiatives including improved processing practices, increased utilization and commercialization of seafood by-products, and new marketing campaigns differentiating and promoting wild Alaska seafood products. These and other strategies to increase value and decrease costs will likely continue to be the key method in this industry of adding value to a resource which will remain relatively fixed. 

SWAMC Co-Sponsoring Small Business Workshop 

SWAMC is partnering with the Kodiak Chamber of Commerce and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to offer a one-day small business and economic development workshop for residents of the Kodiak Archipelago. The workshop will take place November 30 and is for current and prospective business owners, lenders, Tribal entities, educators, and others interested in learning about and discussing what makes for a successful business in rural Alaska. To learn more, please visit the meeting webpage. There is no cost to attend, but advanced registration is required. 

 Film Tax Credit Pays Off Again for SWAMC Region

"We really want to show to people in this show the whole sort of spectrum of these individuals. So it'd be one thing to just do a show about their rescues, which would be great, but we want to do more than that," said the Weather Channel's vice president of content and development, Michael Dingley. "We want to make these people, these wonderful heroes if you will, relatable to you and me." The reason behind displaying their biographical and family lives will be to show how these people are relatable to the audience rather than being makeshift superheroes. 

www.alaskajournal.com 

Southwest Alaska possesses - by far - one of the greatest concentrations of fisheries wealth in the country. Well, when you break this down to hard data, what does it mean for the communities closest to the source? Unfortunately, the answer is largely confidential. Due to the lack of individuals or processing capacity throughout much of the region, a vast hole exists in the harvest and value data, which is unfortunate for a region responsible for half the entire production of wild caught seafood in the US. Luckily, the Kodiak fleet has both the operator and processing diversity to aggregate most of the data we are looking for.

The first graph, 2009 - Kodiak Volume & Value by Month, shows the total volume and value of product crossing the docks in Kodiak in 2009. The total volume and value are very similar to the 9 year average over the period, although as expected the highs and lows swing wildly based on individual years, as any fisherman can tell you, boom and bust is all a part of fishing. Total ex-vessel value sold ranges from over $30 million in August to $0 in December; volume ranges from over 76 million pounds in August to 0 lbs in December. Likely there are some deliveries in December, but not enough to avoid confidentiality.

The second graph Kodiak Value by Month 2001 - 2009, while difficult to discern exact value, paints a picture for the range of money entering the community and a temporal flow of new money entering the community. All values are recorded in nominal (current year) dollars, thus $25 million in 2001, is actually worth less than $25 million in 2009. In general, revenue increases in late winter, late summer and early fall; at the turn of the year and beginning of summer there is a lull.

The recorded data not displayed on the aggregated graphs is that a regime shift has been underway over the past 20 years. As noted, variability is the norm; however, within the data some trends are apparent. The first shift is seen in groundfish, where harvests have expanded 20 fold from 1990 to 2010. Between 1990 and 1994, generally low volumes of groundfish were harvested, between 8.4 and 13.8 million pounds, but starting in 1995, volumes expanded continuously and dramatically, from 65.3 to 247.1 million pounds. In the period of low volume until 1994, prices ranged from $0.98 to $1.99 per pound, and after 1995 from $0.21 to $0.54. Closer analysis is required to understand this variation. Halibut and Sablefish have fallen 69% and 88%, respectively, by volume between 1995 and 2009. The data displays a dramatic fall in catch after 1999, from which point halibut and sablefish catch appears more stable; this may be due to validity of the data. The data shows that over the time horizon, prices have strengthened for both IFQ fish, making up most of the value for halibut, but not sablefish. There has been a typical amount of variation in the total amount of halibut taken from the districts surrounding Kodiak (3A & 3B), however the reductions over the time horizon do not correlate to the dramatic reduction in deliveries. Further analysis is required to understand the decline in halibut landings to Kodiak over the time horizon.

• Bristol Bay Regional Vision Summit, Dillingham. November 3-4.  
• U.S. Dept. of Energy LED Streetlights Webinar, November 15. 
• MAP/IMS Refrigeration Workshop, Kodiak. November 29. 
• Small Business and Economic Development Summit, Kodiak. November 30. 
• First Day of the Legislative Session, Juneau. January 17, 2012.  
• 2012 Alaska Young Fishermen's Summit, Juneau. February 13-14, 2012. 
• SWAMC's Annual Economic Summit & Membership Meeting, Anchorage. Feb. 16-17, 2012.