Brian Hagenbuch

Contributing Editor reporting from Seattle, USA

Brian Hagenbuch spent a decade in South America, where he was a journalist for Reuters and Time Out in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. He now lives in Seattle and works as a freelance writer and translator, as well as a commercial fisherman in Bristol Bay. 

Published on
April 10, 2018

Chefs in the Canadian province of British Columbia have banded together to pressure the government to reduce the number of salmon farms off the province’s coast.

Spearheaded by environmental activist David Suzuki the group of over 50 chefs, many of them from high-profile restaurants in Vancouver, are encouraging officials not to renew the leases for 20 net pens that sit on the Broughton Archipelago, an important migratory path for

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Published on
April 5, 2018

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) released their annual prediction for the upcoming salmon harvest in the state, with an overall dip from 2018 on a poor forecast for pink salmon

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Published on
April 2, 2018

Alaska’s Pacific halibut season is underway with lower quotas and a confluence of market factors driving down

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Published on
March 21, 2018

Alaska Governor Bill Walker and other state officials sent a letter earlier in the month to the federal government to request a disaster declaration for the Kodiak-based Pacific cod fishery in the Gulf of Alaska. 

The declaration would free up federal funds for people affected by low cod numbers in the gulf, where biologists turned up an 83 percent drop in the population from 2015, prompting the National Marine Fisheries Service to slash

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Published on
March 8, 2018

Biologists in the Gulf of Alaska are expanding their studies of the struggling Pacific cod after all-time low numbers in 2017 prompted the North Pacific Fisheries Management Council (NPFMC) to slash the 2018 quota by 80

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Published on
March 7, 2018

University of Washington fisheries researcher Ray Hilborn said that a new study using satellite data from industrial fishing vessels to map global fishing effort fails to provide any new insight, despite media reports indicating otherwise. 

The study, published in Science in February, used messages transmitted between 2012 and 2016 from the automatic identification systems (AIS) of more than 70,000 industrial fishing vessels to create a

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Published on
March 2, 2018

The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) hosted its first ever all-female trade mission recently, with seven European seafood buyers touring Dutch Harbor, Alaska, home to one of the world’s most lucrative fishing ports. 

The women represented companies that import some USD 60 million (EUR 48.9 million) in U.S. seafood to France, Germany, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. 

Hannah Lindoff, ASMI’s

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Published on
February 7, 2018

Canada’s Fisheries Minister Dominic LeBlanc announced on Tuesday, 6 February, that the Canadian government is moving forward with proposed legislation for a CAD 284 million (USD 227 million, EUR 184 million) overhaul of the nation’s Fisheries Act.

According to CBC News, the legislation would include money to hire new officers to enforce stricter regulations and would free up government funds to rebuild depleted

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Published on
January 30, 2018

Activists fighting a proposed gold and copper mine in Bristol Bay, Alaska breathed a sigh of relief on Friday, 26 January, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) upheld an Obama-era declaration that the proposed Pebble Mine, which would sit in the watershed for the world’s biggest sockeye salmon run, could cause irreversible harm to area fisheries. 

Fishermen, native groups, and conservationists fought against the mine

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Published on
December 31, 2017

NOAA Fisheries adopted in December two Endangered Species Act (ESA) recovery plans for three different species in the Snake River basin. The recovery plans, which NOAA is required to adopt by the ESA, have the goal of delisting regional spring and summer Chinook and steelhead as well as fall Chinook salmon.

NOAA had already adopted a recovery plan for regional sockeye salmon, which are protected by the ESA alongside the other three species

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