TRADE: The Lower 48 Market.

• Author: MAYER, AMY
• Position: Alaska's trade

From gold to fish to computer software--Alaska ventures south with products and resources manufactured, extracted or harvested in state.

If you want to know how much Alaska is exporting to foreign countries-how much fish, how much zinc, how many potatoes--you can generate those statistics from the databases that follow the taxes and fees associated with international trade. But if you want to know how many dollars worth of Alaska goods are sold by Alaska 49er and other companies to the Lower 48 and Hawaii, you're on your own.

"It's one of those more imprecise types of things that you're trying to measure," says Sally Saddler, a business development specialist with the Department of Economic and Community Development in Juneau. "We don't have a service that's kind of trapping or capturing that activity."

The Port of Anchorage and the shipping companies can give you a volume of total goods sent north or south, but they don't have a way to measure specific products. Not surprisingly, the gross numbers suggest much more is coming into the state than leaving it. Suzanne Fairbanks, the Alaska market analyst for Totem Ocean Trailer Express, says that for every load going south, there are 10 loads coming up to Alaska.

"From the banana you would eat to anything you would buy at Wal-Mart, anew car ... there is basically a whole segment of goods," she says.

And as for the things heading south out of Alaska, Fairbanks says those loads tend to be household possessions, military vehicles and seafood. And of course oil. All of the oil that goes through the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, and through Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. in Valdez, is shipped to west coast refineries--a throughput of over a million barrels per day.

Even so, many of the raw materials that come out of the ground in Alaska don't make it to market in the Lower 48. The Red Dog mine in Northwest Alaska ships all of its lead and zinc out on foreign-owned vessels. Manager John Key says there's no financially viable alternative. And federal law prohibits shipping from one U.S. port to another with a foreign vessel or crew. Key says some refined lead and zinc may return to market in the United States, but then they are considered imports rather than Alaska products.

The Usibelli Coal Mine doesn't send anything to market in the Lower 48 either. Public Relations Director Becki Phipps says half of the coal is used in Interior Alaska and the other half is sold to South Korea.

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