Wild salmon prices likely to skyrocket from expected closure

The price of a filet of B.C.'s wild salmon is expected to rise dramaticallyif the government follows through on plans tocompletely shut down thesockeye fishery.

Shah Hamid, of Seven Seas Seafood in Delta, expects the price of fresh sockeye to rise by as much as 75 per cent in the coming weeks.

The company, he said,sold nearly a quarter million kilograms of sockeye in 2006, but this summerit will be laying off the 10 workers who normally would be processing the Fraser River harvest.

"It will be really felt in the off-season, December through March," Hamid said. "Restaurants that usually have frozen product that you can thaw out and filet you're not going to have that."

This summer's sockeye salmon runsare shaping up to be some of theworst on record. All commercial fishing for sockeye on the Fraser River has been closed.

Officials at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans this week confirmed to CBC thatthey may cancel all commercial, recreation and aboriginal fishing for sockeye on the Fraser River, including all its tributaries,for the rest of the season.

There is some Skeena River sockeye now available, along with some spring salmon, said Hamid, but that supply will quickly dwindle, and the real impact will be felt in the coming months.

Jordan Specht, a fish monger on Granville Island, agreed. He said filets are currently selling for $40 per kilogram, and if there's no fishing on the Fraser, they could go up to $66.

"Usually it starts out at a higher price and then the price goes down, but this year we haven't seen that price drop," said Specht.

At the Go Fish shop on Vancouver's Fisherman's Wharf, manager Wanda Johannsen said she's now selling about18 kilogramsof Skeena River sockeye a day, and the Fraser River fish will be missed.

"It's going to be pretty devastating, but we're going to do our best to serve halibut and cod," said Johannsen.

The pre-season forecast for returning fish in southern B.C.was just over 1 million, but an in-season adjustment was made to half a million, Timber Whitehorse, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans spokesperson for the Fraser River Salmon Stock Assessment in Kamloops, told CBC.