Commercial fishing gets blame

BOISE – The effort to restore endangered salmon and steelhead in the Pacific Northwest can’t progress until commercial fishing for the species is curtailed, Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne said Tuesday.

“How can Idaho justify its continuing sacrifice for salmon if it only amounts to increased ocean and downstream harvest prior to achieving recovery?” Kempthorne said at a conference of tribal, state, agriculture and hydroelectric representatives. “Commercial harvest of listed species is simply counterintuitive to recovery.”

But representatives of the commercial fishing industry and some salmon advocates maintain that the most harm to salmon and steelhead runs is coming from dams, not hooks and nets.

“If you look at total human-induced mortality, 5 percent comes from tribal, commercial and sport fishing harvests while 80 to 85 percent comes from the dams,” said Glen Spain, Northwest regional director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations in Eugene, Ore.

“The reason we have such dire problems for salmon recovery in this region is, pure and simple, the dams.”

Bert Bowler, a biologist with Boise-based Idaho Rivers United, said Idaho’s “bread and butter” fish are the spring and summer chinook salmon runs and summer steelhead, all of which have either very limited or no commercial harvesting in the ocean.

Fall-run chinook salmon — which have the highest value for commercial fisherman on the West Coast — only spawn in Idaho in the Snake River between Hells Canyon and Lower Granite dams. There’s no sport fishing of fall chinook in Idaho.

“The governor doesn’t appear to understand or appreciate that the fish that most benefit Idaho are not being harvested in the ocean to any degree,” said Bowler.

The conference sponsored by the Northwest Power and Conservation Council and the Idaho Council on Industry and the Environment focused on a federal judge’s recent rejection of the Bush administration’s latest plan to improve survival of the fish that migrate annually from the Pacific to inland Northwest rivers and stream to spawn and then die, with their offspring returning to the ocean to begin the cycle anew.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge James Redden in Portland gave the Bush administration one year to come up with a new plan for protecting the fish from being killed when passing through hydroelectric dams in the Columbia River Basin.

Kempthorne acknowledged that hydroelectric dams remain an obstacle to salmon and steelhead survival and called for increased federal investment in fish passage facilities and research. But he said commercial fishing harvests have been ignored for too long as a factor.

“If we are serious, we have to reduce commercial harvest and give these fish a chance to reproduce and contribute to recovery,” Kempthorne said.

“If that means compensating the commercial fishing industry, we need to consider that.”