October 1, 2024 — Scan the seafood case at your local grocery store and you’re likely to see the same staples, no matter where you are: shrimp, salmon, tuna, tilapia, cod. Most of it crossed international borders to reach you.
The U.S. is the world’s second-largest seafood importer, despite the fact that U.S. fishers catch 8 billion pounds of seafood each year. Much of the fish landed here is eaten elsewhere. That conundrum makes it harder for American fishermen to sustain their operations and forces fish to be shipped thousands of miles before it reaches the dinner table. Climate change and global crises disrupting the international market only add to the complications.
Fisheries would be healthier and more sustainable if fish caught locally were consumed locally. But the discrepancy is by design, says Joshua Stoll, associate professor at the University of Maine and founder of Local Catch Network, a hub of seafood harvesters, businesses, researchers, and organizers that supports the growth of community-based seafood.
“We’ve built roads around the world that don’t have exit ramps to our local communities when it comes to seafood,” Stoll says.
A healthier system more reflective of the diversity of U.S. seafood is attainable, Stoll says, if we invest in connecting harvesters and consumers at the regional level. In a paper published in Nature in June, he and his colleagues found that seafood independence—the ability to meet the country’s consumption needs through its own production—is “within reach” for the U.S.
From 2012 through 2021, U.S. fishermen caught 76 percent of the country’s seafood needs on average, Stoll and his colleagues found. As recently as the 1990s, the average was 98 percent. Those numbers are based on the federal recommendation of eight ounces of seafood per week per adult, or 26 pounds annually; Americans currently eat about 20 pounds each per year.