Saving Seafood

US SIMP for shrimp, catfish advocates to lose champion in Cochran

March 6, 2018 — The US lawmaker who is one of the biggest forces behind an effort to make imported shrimp comply with new National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) record keeping rules for imports is calling it quits.

Mississippi Republican senator Thad Cochran, the 81-year-old chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee and the longest current serving member of Congress, cited health issues on Monday in confirming that he will leave his seat, effective April 1.

He also noted his determination to help reach a long sought after conclusion in efforts to pass final budget legislation before he steps down. The latest continuing resolution, a stopgap spending measure for fiscal 2018, expires on March 23.

I regret my health has become an ongoing challenge,” Cochran said in a statement. “I intend to fulfill my responsibilities and commitments to the people of Mississippi and the Senate through the completion of the 2018 appropriations cycle, after which I will formally retire from the US Senate.”

Cochran, who began his nearly 35-year stay in Congress in the House of Representatives, will be forever remembered as the domestic catfish industry’s best friend on Capitol Hill.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

NOAA unveils details of Trusted Trader Program

February 27, 2018 — The public has less than a month to supply comments on U.S. government proposal to streamline the reporting process for participants in the Seafood Import Monitoring Program.

Last month, NOAA Fisheries unveiled a draft rule regarding the creation of a Commerce Trusted Trader Program, a voluntary effort that seeks to reduce costs for both industry and the government. The first public meeting regarding the proposal took place on 15 February.

Public comments, which can be submitted at the Regulations.gov website, must be submitted by 19 March.

John Henderschedt, director of NOAA Fisheries Office of International Affairs and Seafood Inspection, said the public comment period also gives key stakeholders an opportunity to learn more about the proposed rule.

Henderschedt said NOAA officials planned for a Trusted Trader concept when SIMP was first announced. However, the agency needed to develop the SIMP framework first before delving into the specifics of the Trusted Trader program.

Companies that participate in the Trusted Trader Program still would be required to maintain the traceability records – from the time of harvest to the time it reaches the U.S. – on all seafood products listed under SIMP.

In general terms, the Trusted Trader Program will run similar to the PreCheck initiative offered to frequent travelers by the Transportation Security Administration, with a couple of exceptions. First, seafood importers will have to adhere to the SIMP regulations and incorporate them into their standard operating procedures.

Second, the participating companies will be required to hire a third-party firm to audit their records annually to ensure they’re maintaining compliance with SIMP. If the Trusted Trader Program becomes reality, companies could lose their status if audits indicate they’re not abiding by the regulations.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

NOAA Fisheries Seeking Comment on Commerce Trusted Trader Program For U.S. Importers

February 26, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — NOAA Fisheries is seeking public comment on a proposed rule to establish a voluntary Commerce Trusted Trade Program for U.S. importers.

The Commerce Trusted Trade Program would “maintain the effectiveness” of the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) by streamlining the reporting and record keeping requirements of U.S. importers who “commit to establishing internal traceability and auditing measures.” The goal of the program would be to not only streamline processing of import entries, but reduce costs for the government and industry.

SIMP became mandatory for importers on January 1, but NOAA has so far been lenient. The organization has allowed a temporary ease on entry rules to prevent disruption,  giving brokers a chance to clear shipments with incomplete or missing data. However, beginning April 7, all filings that are covered by SIMP regulations will have to comply with the electronic filing in order to receive a “may proceed” on an entry.

NOAA has scheduled public listening sessions for the proposed rule. A webinar will be held on February 28 at 3 p.m. Eastern, and a meeting will also take place at Seafood Expo North America in Boston on March 12.

This story originally appeared on Seafoodnews.com, a subscription site. It is reprinted with permission.

 

NOAA to end SIMP “informed consent” period in April

February 16, 2018 — The date when the United States will begin enforcing full compliance with a program designed to prevent illegally fished and counterfeit products has been set as 7 April, according to a statement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Seafood Import Monitoring Program officially took effect on 1 January, nearly 13 months after officials revealed its regulations that required importers to keep records on selected products. However, officials opted to begin the program with an “informed compliance” phase, choosing to allow shipments with missing or misconfigured data.

“NOAA Fisheries has observed an encouraging and steadily increasing rate of compliance with SIMP filings,” the agency said in a statement.

SIMP requires importers to maintain records for Atlantic cod, blue crab, dolphinfish, grouper, king crab, Pacific cod, red snapper, sea cucumber, sharks, swordfish, and tunas detailing how they were caught or harvested and tracking the products until they reach the U.S.

In January 2017, the National Fisheries Institute and a group of seafood companies sued the government, claiming SIMP violated federal law. However, a federal judge in August ruled against the plaintiffs, saying Congress gave the authority to agencies to issue regulations.

On Tuesday, a spokesman for the NFI said that programs like SIMP experience “growing pains” and that the industry will look for opportunities to help NOAA handle such issues as the April deadline draws closer.

“NFI members will work to ensure they are prepared for full implementation of SIMP,” said Gavin Gibbons, the NFI’s vice president of communications.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

More US Senators push for shrimp to be added to SIMP

February 13, 2018 — A bipartisan group of 11 U.S. Senators have signed on to a plan that would require the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to add shrimp to the Seafood Import Monitoring Program.

In a letter addressed to Sens. Thad Cochran (R-Mississippi) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the senators expressed their support for language in the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, which mandates the inclusion of shrimp in the monitoring program within 30 days of the spending bill’s enactment.

SIMP, which officially took effect last month, requires imported seafood to be traced from the time it was caught or harvested to the time it reaches the United States. The program was created to crack down the sale of counterfeit or illegally caught seafood products to consumers.

Most of the seafood Americans consume is imported and shrimp makes up nearly two-thirds of those imports. Shrimp was one of the species included in the program. However, federal officials have waived it from compliance at this point until similar recordkeeping requirements are also in effect for domestic producers. That, however, has not stopped U.S. commercial fishing groups from pushing NOAA add shrimp to the program.

“The domestic, wild-caught shrimp industry has been in a state of decline for decades due to the flood of cheap, imported shrimp from countries such as India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam,” said Ryan Bradley, Director of the Mississippi Commercial Fisheries United. “This bill is a beacon of hope for our coastal communities that greatly rely on domestic shrimp production – the largest commercial fishing industry in the southeastern United States.”

In their letter, the senators expressed concerns over the use of unapproved antibiotics in foreign farmed shrimp and cited reports of human rights abuses by processors in Thailand, one of the world’s largest shrimp providers.

“We believe that SIMP is a key step to restoring a level playing field for the U.S. shrimp industry,” the senators wrote.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

 

Chesapeake crab caper results in felony charges

January 23, 2018 — More than three years after federal fish fraud investigators were tipped off that a Virginian seafood company was selling foreign crabmeat labeled as more expensive domestic crabmeat, federal prosecutors filed felony charges against Casey’s Seafood owner, James R. Casey, 74, of Poquoson, Va.

At the time of the tip in 2014, The Baltimore Sun had begun following special agents tracking crab fraud among other kinds of seafood fraud.

The Sun found that, despite increased concerns about such fraud, the number of enforcement cases brought by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency had plummeted after the agency began cutting the “special agents” who investigate fish fraud in 2010.

As the world’s seafood resources decline, substituting other species of seafood for rarer and more expensive ones has become a lucrative business as well as a growing concern for governments and health officials.

Jack Brooks, co-owner of J.M. Clayton Seafood in Cambridge, described how easy it is to commit fraud with crabmeat in a 2014 letter he wrote to the federal task force establishing the new rules to mitigate seafood fraud. It happens, he wrote, when “unscrupulous domestic companies, seeing a quick and profitable opportunity” simply put imported crabmeat into a domestic container.

Brooks, who processes crab, added that there is “no or very limited enforcement” of such fraud, which can net businesses an extra $4 to $9 per pound. That leaves domestic competitors with higher costs and puts seafood-related jobs in jeopardy.

During their investigation, NOAA agents sent eight containers of Casey’s Seafood crabmeat bought at stores in Delaware and Virginia to a laboratory in College Park for DNA testing. The results confirmed the tip: seven of the eight Casey’s containers labeled as “Product of the USA” contained swimming crab found only outside U.S. waters, according to court documents.

Read the full story at the Baltimore Sun

 

Jones Calls for Tough Measures on Illegal Shrimp Imports

January 16, 2018 — WASHINGTON — The following was released by the office of Congressman Walter Jones:

Congressman Walter B. Jones (NC-3) is continuing his long-standing fight to level the playing field for shrimping families in Eastern North Carolina and across the country.  In his latest move, Jones is calling for foreign shrimp to be part of a tough new federal monitoring program to prevent the dumping of illegal shrimp into the American market.

Foreign seafood is often produced and imported into the U.S. through illegal means including: production in countries/facilities that use slave labor; production in foreign aquaculture facilities (shrimp farms) that use illegal antibiotics banned for human consumption by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) due to a range of health impacts including antimicrobial resistance and cancer; and transshipment or mislabeling in order to evade public health testing or anti-dumping duties.  In late 2016, the Obama administration established a new Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) to ensure there are proper record keeping requirements on seafood to prevent the dumping of illegal products into U.S. markets.  Unfortunately, shrimp was not included in that program.  Jones and several of his congressional colleagues want that changed.

In a letter sent last week, the congressmen urged U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross to include shrimp in the Seafood Import Monitoring Program.

“The U.S. shrimp industry is a very critical part of the Gulf and South Atlantic economies but is it slowly eroding as we allow Asian and South American countries to continue their illegal dumping activities,” said Jones and his colleagues.   “The inclusion of shrimp in Seafood Import Monitoring Program would provide a tremendous amount of transparency in the process, while also allowing this trade enforcement tool to reduce the number of illegal chemicals that are used to undercut our labeling regulations and seafood prices.  By doing this the U.S. will protect itself from becoming a dumping ground for illegal and often contaminated seafood products, and stabilize a market that has been manipulated for far too long.”

The problems with illegal and often unsafe shrimp imports are widely documented.  According to data presented in a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report entitled: Imported Seafood Safety: FDA and USDA Could Strengthen Efforts to Prevent Unsafe Drug Residues (GAO-17-443, Sept. 2017):

  • FDA tested only 0.1 percent of all seafood import entry lines for the presence of banned antibiotics in FY 2015 (see Figure 3 of the report).
  • FDA reported that it had taken 550 shrimp samples for drug testing in FY 2015 and, of those, 67 were found to have the presence of unsafe drug residues.  That is the equivalent of a 12.2 percent violation rate. 
  • The GAO further notes that same year (FY 2015), the U.S. imported 1.3 billion pounds of shrimp. When applied to all 1.3 billion pounds of shrimp imports that year, the 12.2 % violation rate suggests that as many as 158.6 million pounds of contaminated shrimp may have entered the U.S. during that fiscal year.  Assuming an average serving size of 0.5 pounds, this further suggests that more than 300 million servings of antibiotic-contaminated shrimp may have been consumed by tens of millions of individual U.S. consumers in 2015. 

In addition, shrimp from several foreign countries including China, India, Thailand and Vietnam have been subject to anti-dumping duties for over 10 years after producers there were found to be illegally dumping massive quantities of shrimp on the U.S. market.  The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) recently extended those duties for another five years after finding that removing them would likely result in a resumption of illegal dumping. Congressman Jones has been a long-time advocate for the duties, and applauded the ITC’s decision.

 

Gulf shrimpers push for monitoring

January 8, 2018 — The $5.7 billion dollar U.S. industry built on the importation of foreign shrimp is not happy about a monitoring provision tucked away inside a pending federal budget bill, though the Gulf shrimp industry is all for it.

The provision, part of Senate Bill 1662, would remove a stay on including imported shrimp under the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP), a new set of reporting and record-keeping requirements implemented by the National Marine Fisheries Service. SIMP is aimed at preventing illegal, unreported and unregulated-caught and/or misrepresented seafood from entering the U.S. market.

Jan. 1, 2018, was the compliance deadline for 10 other species under SIMP, though shrimp and abalone were to be phased in later. The provision in S.B. 1662, if it takes effect, would give the U.S. import shrimp industry 30 days to prepare for the new reporting requirements. Imports represent 90 percent of the U.S. shrimp industry.

“Importers of record,” typically U.S.-based seafood dealers, would be required to maintain records for at least two years on the type of species caught, when and where the species were harvested, quantity and weight of the harvest, type of gear used, name and flag of the fishing vessel, first point of landing and other data.

Read the full story at the Brownsville Herald

 

NFI seeks to reach administration on seafood trade in 2018

January 2, 2018 — Pressing the importance of all trade on the Donald Trump administration, including imported seafood, will be one of the top priorities of the National Fisheries Institute (NFI) in 2018.

The US seafood industry’s biggest trade association, representing close to 300 companies, is still smarting from several of the moves made by the White House and its Cabinet in their first year, including its formal withdrawal from a trade deal with Pacific countries, a lack of progress on a trade deal with Europe and implementation of the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (Simp).

But NFI president John Connelly said trade will remain a top focal point for the group in the New Year.

“We just need to spend more time on the Hill and in the administration to help them appreciate that not all trade is negative for the US,” Connelly told Undercurrent News in an December interview at his office in McLean, Virginia. “Seafood is not like steel or autos or something else. We cannot now produce enough seafood in the US, whether it be from wild capture or aquaculture, to feed all Americans.”

The US exports 40% to 60% of the seafood it produces, depending on the value of the dollar and some other factors, and imports about 85% of the seafood it consumes. Seafood is responsible for 1,270,141 jobs in the U.S. and imports account for 525,291 of those, according to Department of Commerce data noted by the association.

“Gladys, down in Brownsville, Texas, is cutting imported tilapia right now, and that job is extraordinarily important to her family. Why is that job any less important than a job involving domestic codfish?” Connelly said.

High points and low points in 2017

But in looking back at 2017, Connelly can point to at least one major trade-related victory: The removal of the prospective border adjustment tax from the legislative tax overhaul passed by Congress and signed by the president before leaving on its winter break. The provision, which was supported by several Republican leaders, would have forced some seafood dealers to raise their prices 30% to 40%, said Connelly, quoting a Wall Street Journal article.

Read the full story at Undercurrent News

 

Industry’s challenge to seafood import monitoring program rejected

August 29, 2017 — A legal challenge to the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) – a set of regulations requiring increased traceability for seafood imports – was rejected on Monday, 28 August.

The lawsuit was filed earlier this year by the National Fisheries Institute (NFI) and a large group of U.S. seafood companies, including Trident Seafoods, Fortune Fish and Gourmet, Handy Seafood, and Alfa International Seafood. The industry representatives argued that the program violated federal law and that their businesses would be harmed as a result of its implementation.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled against the plaintiffs, finding that the Commerce Department’s implementation of the program was not done inappropriately. Specifically, Mehta found that SIMP was issued under rules allowed under the Magnuson-Stevens Act and Administrative Procedure Act, and that the department properly completed a regulatory flexibility analysis to determine SIMP’s impact on small businesses.

“The court finds that the rule’s issuance did not run afoul of the MSA, and the current Secretary of Commerce validly ratified the rule, thereby curing any alleged constitutional defect in the rule’s promulgation,” Mehta wrote.

Read the full story at Seafood Source