The U.S. Demand for Seafood Depends on Overseas Imports

The U.S. seafood trade deficit widened to $25.8 billion (about €24 billion) in 2023, compared to $20.3 billion (about €18.8 billion) in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

U.S. Industry Opposition to Seafood Imports Rises

However, with the weak demand for seafood in the U.S. consumer market in recent years, opposition to seafood imports from domestic seafood-related industries in the U.S. is once again high, especially from the Alas seafood industry, which catches pollock, and the Southern Shrimp Alliance, which catches wild shrimp.

Over the past few years, the U.S. has imported an average of about 28,000 tons of cod products per year from China between 2018 and 2022, which were mainly made using raw Russian pollock.

However, but with the U.S. embargo on Russian seafood in response to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, at the behest of Alaskan legislators and some Alaska pollock producers. A number of loopholes were closed, a loophole that had allowed Chinese-processed Russian pollock products to legally enter the U.S. market. U.S. seafood distributors (primarily on the East Coast) used the loophole to supply retail products such as pollock fish sticks and fast food service products such as pollock sandwiches.

Calls to close this loophole grew in the middle of last year (2023) as Alaskan cod producers felt the brunt of the market collapse due to Russia's sale of lower-priced pollock to the world market. U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan from Alaska has been outspoken about eliminating the loophole, saying it is in the interest of U.S. fishermen and seafood processors.

Meanwhile, the U.S. domestic shrimp industry is currently working to once again impose antidumping duties on farmed shrimp imports from Ecuador, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam.2023 In December, the organization won a ruling from the International Trade Commission (ITC), which found that there were reasonable indications that these shrimp imports were harming the U.S. domestic wild shrimp fishing industry. The U.S. is likely to impose a new round of tariffs on shrimp imports from these countries.

The fight over pollock imports even led Alaskan pollock giant Trident Seafoods to withdraw from the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), the largest seafood trade group in the U.S. Trident Seafoods accused the NFI of supporting the sale of Russian-caught seafood in the U.S. market, in violation of the broad congressional support for a ban on Russian seafood imports.Trident Seafoods has been a member of the organization since 1978.

In December 2023, Michael Kotok, president of Arctic Fisheries, a seafood distributor based in Buffalo, New York, expressed his displeasure with the ban on imports of pollock that had been processed in China in a lengthy post on LinkedIn after the statement was released.

Kotok wrote: "Now, the entire industry is wondering where we are going to get our supply and seafood from." Domestic U.S. seafood production simply cannot meet even the most basic needs of American consumers."

Trade sanctions won't solve the underlying problem

However, you have to ask whether anti-trade actions will help. In the case of the pollock industry, wholesale prices for cod remain weak and most markets have yet to recover from the ongoing market downturn in consumer demand. Many U.S.-based seafood products even require government purchases to address the inventory crisis.

Yet the dependence of the U.S. seafood market on imports is indisputable, and there is a real demand for imported seafood, both from consumers and importers, as well as from retailers and restaurant operators. Seafood imports contribute significantly to the U.S. economy in terms of industry output, value-added products, and labor income.

Although the U.S. seafood industry experienced a severe blow from the COVID-19 outbreak, reducing seafood imports is not the fundamental solution to the problem. The United States cannot rely entirely on its own seafood supply, and imported seafood will remain an important way to meet domestic demand.