Life is full of unintended consequences. Global trade policies are often rife with them. Politics and trade deals generate untold numbers of side effects and unanticipated problems.

Case in point: Alaska's fisheries. A large part of the Great Land's economy is dependent on commercial fishing, notably salmon and pollock. These wild-caught fish, of course, have to be processed for market, and that requires not only filleting but the time-consuming detail work of removing "pin" bones. 

So, Alaska salmon are generally caught, headed and gutted here, and then sent to China for the remaining processing, following which they are sent back to the United States, and now those Alaska-caught fish are subject to the heavy tariffs the Trump administration has placed on China.

The tariffs will affect Alaska seafood sent over and processed in China and re-exported to the US, a common practice for Alaska products like pollock and salmon. Over half of Alaska’s fish is sent to China, where pin bones are removed by cheap labor, then is re-imported as packaged for retail to the US.

While Alaska salmon is headed and gutted on this side of the Pacific Ocean, to process fillets and remove pin bones is very labor intensive, so companies like Trident Seafoods and others use the massive processing centers in cities like Qingdao, Dalian, and Yantai in Shandong and Liaoning provinces, which are global seafood processing centers.

It's hard to see a quick fix to this, other than the Alaska fisheries finding enough people to work at a rather onerous job processing fish. Of course, it's a basic principle of economics and employment that you can find people to work at any job, providing the pay is generous enough - but that adds to the cost.

Of course, there's a reason that Chinese labor is so cheap:

China uses forced labor, including conditions that Americans would view as slave labor, in Qingdao and other parts of Shandong Province to process fish. Qingdao has a reputation for using and abusing minorities, particularly Uyghurs and North Koreans, in its seafood processing plants.

This lends a moral aspect to the whole thing. China's use, or more accurately abuse, of slave labor has drawn fierce disapproval and condemnation from most of the modern world, although China seems not to care a jot about whether the West approves or not.

For the time being, however, the process is what it is, and the tariffs would seem to give farmed salmon from other countries an advantage in American markets.

Meanwhile, farmed salmon from Scotland, Norway, and Chile, are also processed in these same facilities. Those farmed salmon products have very low tariffs — in the teens — between the respective countries. Alaska wild salmon is already significantly more expensive than the farmed salmon that is ubiquitous in the Lower 48.

It's an interesting problem.

See Also: Europe Scrambles to Make a Deal: Ready to Talk Tariffs With Trump

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Hopefully, this will only be a problem for Alaskan fishermen in the short term, although China doesn't seem terribly interested in coming to the table. One could make an argument for a tariff exemption for Alaska fish processed in China, but then every possible industry with every conceivable product would be seeking a similar exemption until things just grew absurd. 

There's another possibility: Roughly 70 to 85 percent of American seafood is imported, with China being a major source. The tariffs may make all imported seafood from China more expensive, and so make American-grown (or from other nations carrying lower tariffs) more attractive in comparison. Feature or bug? 

As with so much that's going on right now, we're in an undiscovered country. Unintended consequences like this will keep appearing. Some of them will be positive, others negative. But it seems that the president has set his course and is going to run it, and since other nations are starting to ask for talks - the European Union being one of the latest - it's beginning to look like it's going to work.

The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.

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