For decades, subsistence users have asked for greater restrictions on the commercial fishery that intercepts their fish so that their stocks remain protected and their freezers remain full. But commercial fishermen say that they also depend on the fish.
For Charles, that’s beside the point. The Area M Commercial fishery has continued to take about the same amount of chum since at least the 1980s, while the counts on the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers have crashed to next to nothing.But Thompson said that without salmon fishing, his Aleutian town of Sand Point would literally disappear.
“From an economic point of view, you’d look at that trade-off between shutting one fishery to enhance some returns,” said Knapp. “How big a hit are you asking Area M to take, and how much would taking the hit actually benefit the Western Alaska river users?” Commercial fishing is almost non-existent on the Kuskokwim, and the commercial chum fishery on the Yukon, which used to employ hundreds, closed over two years ago. Though the decade-old genetics study says Area M is taking less than 1% of chum salmon from Arctic, Yukon, and Kuskokwim rivers, desperate subsistence users are begging the government to take every action possible.
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