June 4, 2025 — Newport’s Local Ocean restaurant is the kind of place where you might have lunch next to the fisherman who caught it.

That’s according to Laura Anderson, co-founder of the more than 20-year-old restaurant.

“Creating market opportunity for fishers and showcasing local species were really what drove the founding of the restaurant,” Anderson said over a tuna wrap with fries on a recent Friday afternoon.

The tuna in her wrap comes directly from Oregon fishers, Anderson said. Local Ocean has built its business around buying as much fish as it can directly from Newport’s fleet of commercial fishing boats.

That makes Local Ocean an anomaly. The majority of seafood sold at restaurants on the Oregon coast doesn’t come from Oregon, according to a 2023 report commissioned by the Oregon Coast Visitors Association. Meanwhile, most fish from Oregon’s commercial fleet are exported to foreign markets.

Although restaurants like Local Ocean are working to convince diners that locally-sourced fish is delicious and easy to incorporate into most meals, on the whole, Americans don’t choose fish as their daily protein source. By contrast, fish is the number one protein source in most Asian countries, where it is regularly included in daily meals. The lack of fish consumption here makes access to foreign markets especially important for fishers.

That was the challenging market environment facing Oregon’s fishing industry before President Donald Trump made two major moves during the first few months of his second term: cuts to the federal workforce and tariffs that are causing foreign buyers to retaliate against U.S. sellers.

On Wednesday, the International Trade Court ruled the bulk of Trump’s tariffs illegal after Oregon and 11 other states sued the administration over the import taxes. On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals froze that decision as it considers the administration’s appeal. Many economists say the back and forth on tariffs have already done lasting damage to U.S. industries.

“Fishing and having a life in the fishing industry is chaotic,” Heather Mann, executive director of Newport-based Midwater Trawlers Cooperative, said. “There’s ups and downs for all variety of reasons from season to season, year to year. So a lot of people will say, ‘Oh my gosh, the tariffs. The tariffs, how is that impacting you?’ And my response right now is, in terms of seafood and exporting seafood, we’re uncertain. We don’t know.”

Federal officials key to facilitating Oregon fishing industry

The fishing industry, like many others, relies on global trade. Oregon exported nearly $50 million worth of seafood to global markets last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Foreign Trade Division accessed via wisertrade.org.

In the same period of time, $102 million worth of imported seafood flowed through Oregon. Some of it ended up on plates in coastal restaurants, some of it went to Oregon grocery stores, and a lot of it was ultimately shipped to other states for consumption.

Mann’s organization is a nonprofit trade group representing more than 30 vessels that fish on the Pacific Ocean. She’s been at the helm for just over a dozen years. Mann said the current back-and-forth on tariffs creates market uncertainty.

However, people who make a living pulling fish out of the ocean have contended with numerous challenges in recent years, from tariffs and other global trade disruptions to wars, the pandemic and natural disasters.

In the immediate term, Mann said fishers need three things to do their job: independent scientific surveys that measure the health of a fishery; stock assessments that take that information to help determine where, when and how much it’s ok to fish of a certain species; and trained workers to complete those tasks on an ongoing basis.

“Without those three things,” Mann said, “exporting fish doesn’t matter because we won’t be able to fish.”

Read the full article at KLCC