May 8, 2020 — With the global food supply chain under stress, President Trump’s executive order Thursday will help reduce pain in the grocery checkout line—and also strengthen U.S. food production against foreign competition.
The order creates an administrative trade task force to find new markets for American seafood products and identify unfair trade barriers. It also supports industry research, removes unnecessary regulations on commercial fishermen, and streamlines the aquaculture permitting process.
These reforms will allow producers to make better use of the country’s ample resources. The U.S. has one of the world’s largest exclusive economic zones, a vast area of ocean in which we have sovereign rights over natural resources. But more than 85% of seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported. U.S. fish farms produce only $1.5 billion a year, compared with $140 billion in China. Much foreign seafood comes from fish farms in countries that often fail to meet international standards on health, labor and the environment. Many of China’s catfish and tilapia swim in shallow pens with low oxygen levels, polluted by their own waste along with improperly used antibiotics and fungicides. Farmed fish in South America routinely suffer from infectious anemia, algae blooms and sea lice due to poor biosecurity protocols.
The Trump administration wants to protect American consumers from those unhealthy practices, and American aquaculture is the gold standard. Consider the sleek, silvery and delicious Kanpachi—raised in the deep blue waters off Hawaii’s Big Island, inside high-tech submerged pens developed through American innovation. Hawaii’s cutting-edge ocean farms are subject to the highest environmental standards: The fish are raised in pens with healthy oxygen levels and fed sustainable feed. If American aquaculture is allowed to grow to its full potential, it can help revive domestic fish processing, halting the long-running trend of plants moving to China.
President Trump’s executive order creates a task force to enact policies that encourage fair and reciprocal trade for America’s seafood industry, and strengthens enforcement of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. The order affirms that the U.S. will continue to hold imported seafood to the same food-safety requirements as domestic products. And it removes many burdensome regulations on commercial fishermen.