Saving Seafood

Some tariffs may be gone, but wholesale seafood industry is still reeling

March 19, 2026 — Walking into the Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center in Boston, you can smell the seafood. Which makes sense given that it’s hosting the country’s largest wholesale seafood expo. Suppliers from around the world dole out samples of fresh sashimi, crispy fish sticks, and seaweed salad.

“It’s sweet, and it’s a little bit spicy, and it’s a compliment to meat or heavier stuff,” said Camille Zhu, who runs a seaweed company on the coast of Shandong province in Northern China.

She began selling to the U.S. just last year and said it’s been hard with all the trade tensions and tariffs. But she’s confident in her product.

“People are starting to accept seaweed as a source of nutrition, and they’re looking for a healthy diet,” she said. “And with the popularity of Japanese cuisine, yeah, it’s getting pretty big for us.”

About 80% of seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported. Some of the biggest suppliers —including China and India — have seen some of the highest tariffs from the Trump administration in the past year. All that has thrown the global seafood trade into chaos.

Read the full article at Marketplace

The hidden cost of fisheries subsidies

March 17, 2026 — In public finance, some costs are politely kept off the books. The ocean has long been one of them. Governments often speak of “blue growth” and “sustainable use,” yet many policies still treat marine ecosystems as a kind of free input: available, resilient, and cheap to replace. The result is ecological decline. It is also a fiscal problem. States end up assuming risks they would not tolerate on land.

Fishing provides a clear example. For decades, a large share of industrial effort has been propped up by public money. One influential analysis of high-seas fishing found that governments subsidized high-seas fleets by about $4.2 billion in 2014—more than the estimated net economic benefit of that fishing—and that without subsidies, as much as 54% of the high-seas fishing grounds currently exploited would have been unprofitable at the prices and costs prevailing at the time.

Read the full article at Mongabay

US pushes AI funding, fisheries tech at APEC amid China rivalry

February 12, 2026 — The Trump administration is promoting artificial intelligence exports and maritime surveillance technology at Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings in southern China this week, as Washington seeks to counter Beijing’s technological and maritime influence.

The United States is also using APEC to promote American private-sector technologies designed to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, which Washington says threatens food security and maritime sovereignty in parts of the Pacific.

Ruth Perry, Acting Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, said on Tuesday China’s 18-million-strong distant-water fleet posed enforcement challenges for smaller coastal states.

“Many countries are negatively impacted and China is a perpetrator … the size of the fleet can’t be ignored across the Pacific,” Perry told Reuters, noting reports that suggest an unusual level of state coordination among its actions.

Illegal fishing is frequently linked to other transnational crimes including forced labour, trafficking and smuggling, Perry said.

Perry noted that China’s revised Fisheries Law is due to take effect from May. “They’re saying all the right things and we want to see if they’re going to follow through with those actions.”

Read the full article at Reuters

Trump threatens 100 percent tariffs on Canada over trade deal with China

January 26, 2026 — U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on Canada if it follows through in finalizing a trade deal with China.

“The last thing the World needs is to have China take over Canada. It’s NOT going to happen, or even come close to happening! Thank you for your attention to this matter,” Trump said in a 24 January social media post.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

US Congressional committee accuses China’s distant-water fishing fleet of intimidation, ecological destruction

January 20, 2026 — The U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party has released an investigation accusing China of being “the world’s largest perpetrator of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.”

The committee made several strong claims about China’s distant-water fishing fleet, accusing the Chinese government of using the fleet of roughly 16,000 vessels for intimidation and control.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Canada announces trade deal with China cutting tariffs on lobster, crab

January 16, 2026 — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the country has reached an agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping that will cut Chinese tariffs on key seafood items like lobster and crab.

Canada has faced an additional 25 percent tariff in China on a range of seafood products including halibut, crabs, lobster, clams, and shrimp since 20 March 2025. The tariffs were made in response to a 100 percent Canadian tariff on Chinese electric vehicles and a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum products from China.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

US commission on China calls on Congress to do more to curtail forced labor in seafood supply chain

December 10, 2025 — The U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China’s (CECC) latest annual report – released to coincide with International Human Rights Day – features seafood prominently as it calls on Congress and the U.S. government as a whole to do more to combat forced labor.

Seafood from China has been under scrutiny by the U.S. government, in part thanks to a report released by The Outlaw Ocean Project which released findings of a multi-month investigation into the global seafood supply chain. That investigation found extensive evidence of forced labor in processing facilities operated by multiple Chinese companies connected to the U.S. supply chain and U.S. companies.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

US House committee approves Stop Illegal Fishing Act

December 5, 2025 — The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee has approved the Stop Illegal Fishing Act, legislation that authorizes U.S. President Donald Trump to impose sanctions on foreign individuals and vessels that engage in illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (IUU) fishing.

The authors of the bill say the measure is necessary to crack down on large foreign fishing fleets that have dodgy records on the environment and human rights – particularly China’s distant-water fleet.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

ALASKA: Alaska seafood harvesting jobs down for fifth straight year

December 1, 2025 — Alaska’s commercial fishing industry, facing lower prices for its harvest and rising costs, saw a loss of 443 harvesting jobs in 2024—a fifth straight year of employment loss, state labor officials said.

That 7.6% job decline was similar to the previous year’s 7.8% job loss, the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development noted in the November issue of Alaska Economic Trends.

Seafood harvesting in Alaska has lost over a third of its total jobs in the past decade, with fishing employment down every year of the last 10 except for 2019. That includes the summer peak, which has fallen about 30%, from 24,600 jobs in July 2014 to 17,400 in July 2024.

While most other Alaska industries bounced back after big job declines during the Covid-19 pandemic, seafood harvesting continues to struggle as the industry faces unpredictable runs, the volatility of climate change, seafood processing plant closures and sales, and disrupted fisheries.

International trade is also shifting, with China now purchasing more fish from Vietnam than from the United States.

Labor Department economist Joshua Warren said that how tariffs will affect these relationships isn’t clear, but they will likely put additional pressure on prices as domestic harvesters compete with countries that have more favorable trade deals.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Eel populations are falling, and new protections were defeated. Japan and the US opposed them

December 1, 2025 — Eels are the stuff of nightmares — slimy, snakelike creatures that lay millions of eggs before dying so their offspring can return home to rivers and streams. They’ve existed since the time of the dinosaurs, and some species are more poorly understood than those ancient animals.

Yet they’re also valuable seafood fish that are declining all over the world, leading to a new push for restrictions on trade to help stave off extinction.

Freshwater eels are critically important for the worldwide sushi industry, and some species have declined by more than 90% since the 1980s. The eels have succumbed to a combination of river dams, hydroelectric turbines, pollution, habitat loss, climate change, illegal poaching and overfishing, according to scientists. Some environmental organizations have called for consumers to boycott eel at sushi restaurants.

The loss of eels motivated the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, to consider new restrictions to protect the wriggling fish. The members of CITES, an international treaty, met in Uzbekistan this week to determine if the new rules on trade are needed. Member nations voted against the new protections on Thursday.

Conservation groups said the protections were long overdue, but not everyone was on board. Some fishing groups, seafood industry members and regulatory agencies in the U.S., China and Japan — all countries where eel is economically important — have spoken out against restricting the trade.

Read the full article at the Associated Press