A Bitter Taste: Revealing the Hard-to-Swallow Truth About Your Seafood Dinner
As you sit down with friends and family to enjoy your favorite seafood dish over the holidays, there’s a hard truth to swallow: the seafood on your plate comes from a global seafood industry rife with illegal fishing and human rights abuses.
Seafood is one of the most highly traded commodities in the world, moving from fishers to processors and from suppliers to grocery stores, with many additional steps in between. That piece of fish on your plate has likely traded hands dozens of times before it reaches your mouth. But despite many recent investigations that have revealed the dark underbelly of the global seafood supply chain, the U.S. government has turned its back on repeated promises to protect vulnerable workers, seafood consumers, and our domestic fishing industry. Because of this, the United States has become a dumping ground for illegally caught seafood products.
Up to 85% of the seafood we consume in the United States is imported, and there is a hidden cost that comes with that statistic — a cost measured not just in seafood, but in lives. More than 128,000 workers in the seafood supply chain are currently trapped in forced labor situations around the world, according to the International Labour Organization, and that number is likely a gross underestimation due to the challenges of reaching workers imprisoned at sea. In 2022, the United States — the world’s largest importer of seafood — imported more than 7 billion pounds of seafood worth more than $30.4 billion dollars. And countries known to conduct illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, or that have poor enforcement mechanisms in place to stop it, are major sources of the seafood we consume in the United States. This illegally sourced seafood, and seafood produced with forced labor and other human rights abuses, is still entering U.S. markets, potentially reducing U.S. fishers’ income by an estimated $60.8 million per year.
In the immediate wake of shocking reports about abuses on fishing boats and in factories, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced in November that it inexplicably stopped its plans to expand the Seafood Import Monitoring Program — the primary tool the United States uses to prevent illegal seafood from entering our borders.
Perhaps worse, the agency opened the door to potentially ending the program entirely.
The Seafood Import Monitoring Program has true potential to shed light on the notoriously opaque seafood supply chain. Created nearly a decade ago under President Obama, the program requires catch documentation and traceability for some seafood species at risk of illegal fishing and seafood fraud. But gaps in the program create loopholes that allow problematic seafood to slip through the U.S. border, and NOAA continually fails to operate the program as it was intended, acting as auditors once seafood has already entered our borders instead of screening imports for risk before entry.
Today, the Seafood Import Monitoring Program covers less than half of all seafood imports coming into the United States, and it’s at risk of being downgraded or eliminated entirely. The European Union has required this information for all seafood imports for more than a decade. Japan, Australia, South Korea, and Canada are now all creating their own import control regulations. This is not the time for the United States to fall behind other major seafood importing nations, causing the United States to be a dumping ground for illegal seafood that is blocked from other nations.
The past three presidents and their administrations have claimed that combating IUU fishing was a major goal, yet poor oversight of the seafood supply chain continues unabated. This means U.S. dollars are undoubtedly supporting the influx of products from IUU fishing and human rights abuses.
The U.S. government has the tools needed to combat IUU fishing, seafood fraud, and labor issues. We are just, quite simply, failing to utilize them. To ensure all imported seafood is safe, legally caught, responsibly sourced, and honestly labeled, NOAA and the Biden administration must take concrete steps forward. That starts with keeping the Seafood Import Monitoring Program in place, but also expanding it to include all species and improving upon it to make the program a stronger tool to fight IUU fishing, seafood fraud, and forced labor.
As we peer into the murky waters of the global seafood industry, a chilling truth emerges: Famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau said: “The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.”
But what if that net is one of destruction, exploitation, and suffering?
The Biden administration must step up. There should not be hard truths to swallow about our holiday seafood dinners.
