Saving Seafood

Five-year initiative targets overfishing in six countries

October 15, 2026 — Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP) has launched a five-year initiative aimed at strengthening fisheries management and seafood supply chains across six countries in Northwest Africa and Latin America.

The Global Marine Commodities 2 (GMC2) Project brings together government agencies, seafood industry participants, and other public and private partners in Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Panama. The initiative is implemented by the United Nations Development Program, funded by the Global Environment Facility, and executed by SFP.

The project will combine market-based approaches with fisheries governance efforts to address overfishing and improve the sustainability of seafood supply chains in the Canary Current Large Marine Ecosystem off Northwest Africa and the Pacific Central American Coastal Large Marine Ecosystem.

Representatives from authorities in the six participating countries met remotely Oct. 7 for the project’s first Steering Committee meeting, marking the official global launch of GMC2.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

The catch with bycatch: Saving sharks goes beyond no-fishing policies

October 8, 2026 — The go-to solution for protecting most marine wildlife is to create designated areas where fishing is strictly prohibited. But when it comes to wide-ranging marine animals — such as fast-moving sharks in the tropical waters of the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador — there’s a catch.

Bycatch, that is.

The long fishing lines of tuna boats can accidentally drift into the marine reserves, and they often catch a lot more than tuna — mainly, sharks, turtles and sea lions. This unintentional capture is called bycatch.

“People think that by setting a reserve, that’s getting to an outcome, but it’s not,” said Leah Gerber, professor in Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences and founding director of the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes. “We really wanted to highlight that. What are the implications of this and what really would work?”

Gerber led a new study she co-authored that reveals how data, local knowledge and community collaboration can help shape more effective solutions.

The study compared the efficacy of no-fishing conservation areas with bycatch reduction in the Galápagos Marine Reserve. The researchers ultimately found that reducing bycatch was likely to have a higher conservation impact on sharks.

Read the full article at Arizona State University News

US senator moves to raise tariffs on Ecuadorian shrimp

October 5, 2026 — U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Mississippi) has introduced a bill to raise tariffs on shrimp from Ecuador in a bid to discourage imports and support the domestic shrimp sector.

“Not much has changed since the federal government found that subsidized Ecuadorian shrimp contributed to material injury to the U.S. shrimp industry, except that Ecuador has only increased its shipments into the American market. As a result, Mississippi shrimpers and their counterparts across the Gulf face greater downward pressure on the prices they can get for their products,” Hyde-Smith said in a release. “The Ecuador Shrimp Tariff Act would work to level the playing field so that American shrimpers and processors can continue to compete and grow.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Empty nets in Latin America as fish flee El Niño

October 1, 2026 — Fishermen along Latin America’s Pacific coast are reeling in half-empty nets as ocean warming aggravated by El Niño causes tuna, anchovies and other top catches to migrate to cooler waters.

From Ecuador and Peru in South America to Panama and Guatemala in Central America, some skippers have stopped going out altogether as fish stocks dwindle close to shore, in seas running at up to 6 degrees Celsius above normal.

“The water is warm,” Juan Ollague, 56, told AFP in the southwestern Ecuadorian port of Santa Rosa, where hundreds of idle fishing boats are crammed into a small port.

After a night on the water, Ollague returns with just six small tuna.

“We came away empty-handed,” he lamented.

“Fishing used to be good; now it’s terrible,” fellow skipper Darwin Zambrano, 53, complained as he untangled a net that hasn’t scooped up big tuna like albacore or bonito in weeks.

El Niño is the warming phase of a natural cycle in the tropical Pacific that causes hotter and drier conditions in some places, and cooler and wetter conditions in others.

Read the full article at phys.org

2026’s El Niño is shaping up to be a doozy – it’s already affecting global shipping, fish behavior and heat

September 14, 2026 — El Niño is here, and forecasters warn that it’s likely to be bigger and stronger in 2026-27 than any El Niño event recorded in at least 150 years.

During strong El Niños, global air and ocean temperatures spike, and precipitation patterns shift dramatically – flooding rains deluge places that are normally dry, and drought strikes some of the wettest locations on earth. With this El Niño arriving on top of already high global ocean and air temperatures, it carries the potential for extraordinary impacts to millions of lives throughout the world. Globally, August 2026 was the hottest month on record, according to data from Europe’s Copernicus climate service.

Those effects are already showing up in Central and South America.

Fishing crews in Ecuador are catching fewer tuna and traveling farther from shore to find them as fish migrate to cooler water. Coral reefs are under alert for severe risk of bleaching in many areas.

In Panama, where I live, seabirds common to Ecuador and Peru known as blue-footed boobies began showing up in large numbers in Panama earlier than usual as the sardines and anchovies they eat moved northward to escape the El Niño ocean heat.

Farmers in some regions of Panama have been unable to plant their crops. And many people here are worried about access to drinking water in the coming dry season, normally January to April but predicted to arrive at least a month earlier than usual.

The global economy is also beginning to see far-reaching effects. Worsening drought is reducing the amount of water needed to operate the Panama Canal, resulting in fewer ships with less cargo able to pass through in a day. That leads to higher transit costs for shippers of all kinds of products and slower deliveries.

I am a biologist who has been monitoring the weather in Panama and surrounding regions for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute for almost 40 years. That includes major climatic events such as El Niño, and what I am seeing in Panama in 2026 in terms of heat and drought has already begun to exceed anything that we have measured here in over a century.

Read the full article at The Conservation

Section 301 tariffs leave US seafood importers with few avenues to avoid rising costs

August 10, 2026 — The latest round of tariffs implemented by the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) targeted several countries that heavily produce salmon and shrimp with duty rates between 10 percent and 12.5 percent, leaving U.S. seafood importers with few options for relief from rising costs.

The 60 global economies hit with Section 301 tariffs include top salmon-producing countries such as Norway, Chile, and the U.K., as well as shrimp-producing nations like Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Birds Are Dying. Clues Point to El Niño.

August 7, 2026 — Every month, Giovanny Suárez Espín walks a beach near his home in southern Ecuador, monitoring for dead seabirds. Usually, he sees maybe a handful.

But on recent surveys, the sand has been littered with carcasses.

“Every 10 steps you took, you found five or 10 birds, and it kept going,” said Suárez, who works for American Bird Conservancy, a nonprofit group. “On the three-kilometer walk, we saw lots of dead birds the whole way.”

In June, Suárez and others tallied 638 dead birds on the beaches of three provinces in Ecuador, about seven times the number found over the previous year and a half combined.

“It’s painful,” he said.

In July, they counted an additional 968.

It’s too soon to say for certain what has caused the spike in deaths, which has affected various species, including sooty shearwaters, Peruvian and blue-footed boobies, cormorants, petrels and the critically endangered waved albatross. Die-offs in sea birds aren’t uncommon, and can stem from a variety of factors. In 2023, Ecuador saw mass deaths from avian influenza, said Sebastián Cruz, a seabird ecologist who runs the South American marine bird program for American Bird Conservancy.

But this time, he said, looks different. The birds’ bodies are emaciated. Testing for bird flu is needed, but the few necropsies that have been conducted, along with the behavior of surviving birds, show no signs of infection. And critically, sea surface temperatures off the coast have been exceptionally elevated.

This points to an alarming possibility: The seabirds could already be victims of the building El Niño, a natural climate phenomenon whose effects are now occurring while the planet dangerously warms.

In recent months, as scientists have predicted an El Niño that could be the strongest in recorded history, the attention has focused on how it could hurt humans. And it could hurt us a lot, potentially bringing record heat, drought and torrential rain.

But wildlife stands to suffer, too. Marine mammals and seabirds are among the most at risk.

Read the full article at The New York Times

Southern Shrimp Alliance echoes US congressman’s calls for tariffs on foreign seafood

February 13, 2025 — U.S. Representative Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana) recently sent a letter to the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump that offered simple advice on Trump’s tariff policies: To save American seafood, tax imports from China, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. 

Higgins shared the letter he sent to the president on social media platform X with the caption, “Protecting the American seafood industry requires aggressive action.”

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Ecuador, India, Vietnam shrimp industries facing higher US countervailing duties

March 27, 2024 — The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) is planning to hit shrimp exporters in Ecuador, India, and Vietnam with higher countervailing duties once it posts its preliminary determinations to the Federal Register.

The DOC released its preliminary determinations on 26 March, finding the three countries, as well as individual companies in those countries, benefited from subsidies that gave them an unfair advantage in the U.S. market between 1 January and 31 December 2022.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource