The People

Voices of Salmon Nation

Laura Anderson

LAURA ANDERSON is the founder of Local Ocean Seafood, a restaurant and fish market in Newport, Oregon sourcing product directly from local fisherman. Laura has also been extensively involved with developing successful processes for community based fisheries management.

I’m from a fishing family. My dad was a small boat trawler, fishing mostly for salmon, tuna and crab. I worked as his deckhand — setting the lines, bringing in the fish, cleaning them, icing them down. To be honest, I wasn’t hugely fond of fishing, but it was good work and I respected what my dad did for a living.

Salmon fishing is as much of a challenge now as it was then. Even though salmon prices are almost at an all-time high, there are limited opportunities to fish. Right now it is considered high-risk venture to buy a salmon permit and boat and gear without the guarantee of long-term employment. The younger fishers from my generation tend to work in the higher-value fisheries, like crabbing. However with pot limits there is less financial opportunity than there used to be.

When I started Local Ocean Seafood in Newport in 2002 with my business partner, longtime fisherman Al Pazar, the impetus was to create more economic opportunities for Newport fishermen. At the time, only a handful of processing plants were buying fish. Finding good quality fish wasn’t necessarily the problem. Neither was finding customers who wanted to buy it. The problem was getting that fish from the boat to the customer. So we spent our first couple of years focused on wholesale markets, selling fish to buyers in Seattle and Portland and beyond, and then we shifted our focus to local markets. Our work with Ecotrust and Salmon Nation helped us understand how to co-market a product that maintains the identities of the people who produced it.

Our original vision for Local Ocean Seafoods was to open a seafood market with a small deli attached. We hired several amazing people who put together a really great menu and, well, the restaurant just took off. So rather than being a fish market with a small deli, we are a full seafood restaurant with a small fish market attached. Sometimes you just never know what will happen when you a start a business.

People enjoy coming into the market and being able to identify not only where the fish came from, but how it was harvested and sometimes even the name of the fisher. You know, it’s really simple: Local people want to eat local food. We’re more nourished and enriched when we eat food grown in a place we know. This act of eating locally is part of being a full human being, and it binds us in a common context.

The way I see it, all fisheries have problems. Some have ecological problems, some have economic problems, some have equity problems. One of the most effective ways to work through these problems is to help communities address them at the local level. No one knows more about the abundance and distribution of species in the ocean than the people who are spending the time out there.

The Port Orford community is one of the best examples. Port Orford has a very unique and cohesive fishery but decisions about what happens on the reef are based on the tri-annual trawl survey, which can take place literally hundreds of miles away. There is just no legitimacy in that system. The people of Port Orford have been actively seeking better information so that they can more legitimately manage their fishery and make good recommendations to the decision making entities.

We've been working on this in Port Orford for eight years now. Like any type of community work, it takes a year or two just to come to common terms of agreement and determine common goals. You also have to break down the stereotypes that otherwise take a seat at the table once industry and environmental interests and scientists and bureaucrats all sit down together. Everybody comes with the baggage of stereotypes, and it takes a couple of years to get to know people on a personal level and build trust. Our work in Port Orford has been really well received and is becoming a model for community-based management on the coast, if not beyond.

I like to think that I am a strong advocate for community driven processes, for valuing local knowledge, for working at a smaller scale, for bringing the table and the condiments to the place where the work is happening – and not expecting people to go to the valley to discuss issues that are taking place here on the coast.

My passion is really about keeping fishing as a viable livelihood. I want to make sure that we can feed our communities and that we can preserve our cultural heritage. Fishing teaches a lot in terms of work ethic, survival and financial skills. It’s a good life and I want to see other families have the opportunity to live it.

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