In it most recent meeting, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council said that funding and scheduling concerns could delay final action on chum bycatch until April 2026. The potential delay has been criticized by those who say that chum salmon crashes across Western Alaska, especially on the Yukon River, require swift action.
The Yukon River Drainage Fisheries Association advocates for dozens of communities now in their sixth year of near-total salmon fishing closures. The group’s executive director, Serena Alstrom, called in to the council’s meeting in Oregon on June 10 to stress the importance of sticking to the original December timeline.
"The people who call the Yukon River region home simply cannot afford the luxury of postponement. Their livelihoods, their traditions, and their very future hinge upon timely and effective interventions," Alstrom said.
In February, the council heard three days of testimony on chum bycatch from voices across Western Alaska, as well as from representatives of the multi-billion dollar pollock industry. At that meeting, it moved a step closer to final action on the controversial bycatch issue by laying out a complex set of potential options, ranging from taking no action to implementing a hard cap on the number of chum taken as bycatch in the Bering Sea.
But the timeline for the final decision on chum has now been thrown into question. The council said that there is simply not enough time to address all of the items on its agenda for its next meeting, scheduled for the beginning of December in Anchorage. One proposal by the council is to make space for the chum hearing by moving other items that are considered must-do items to a virtual meeting later in December, but that plan runs up against other scheduling conflicts.
This also comes at a time of funding uncertainty at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency that distributes federal funding to the council. As of June 9, the council said that it had received less than half of its annual grant funding for 2025, despite being three-quarters of the way through its fiscal year, which runs through the end of September.
Council chair Angel Drobnica said that the council intends to schedule final action on chum bycatch as soon as possible, but that a lot of question marks remain.
"Obviously there are a lot of compounding issues that we're facing right now. Currently, as others have stated, while we're very hopeful that we'll receive our next grants, we do not have money to even host an October virtual meeting," Drobnica said.
Drobnica said that the council will likely make a decision about the timing of a chum bycatch hearing in the coming weeks.
Whether or not the council moves to delay the decision, it isn’t clear which option it may choose for managing chum salmon bycatch.
The council contends that the chum bycatch predominantly consists of Russian and Asian hatchery fish, and that roughly 17% of those chums on average over the last decade were from stocks bound for Western Alaska rivers.
At the same time, the volume of chum bycatch recorded in the pollock fishery has dropped significantly in recent years, from a high of more than half a million fish in 2021 to just over 35,000 fish in 2024.
