Nathan Strout

U.S. senators are lining up behind legislation that would exempt seafood processors from the nation’s annual cap on H-2B temporary worker visas.

The seafood processing sector depends on foreign workers to meet seasonal demands. The Maryland crab industry, for example, brings in 500 workers annually via the H-2B program during the crab season.

“For years, the struggle to hire seasonal workers has put an incredible strain on

Several U.S. senators want to be able to track fishery disaster determinations the same way consumers track packages throughout their shipping process.

The Republican lawmakers are demanding more transparency from NOAA Fisheries on how the agency makes determinations of fishery disasters – a designation that makes communities and industries eligible for federal financial relief.

In a 21 December 2023 joint letter to NOAA Assistant

U.S. Senator John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) has introduced legislation that would provide an additional USD 36 million (EUR 33 million) for audits of imported shrimp and red snapper under the Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP).

“Big seafood exporters, such as India and Ecuador, are flooding America’s markets with illegal shrimp and selling it for cheaper than quality Gulf shrimp caught right here at home,” Kennedy said.

The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden unveiled an environmental justice strategy focused on communities dependent on the ocean or marine resources during the United Nations’ Conference of Parties in December 2023.

The federal strategy outlines overarching goals for advancing environmental justice for communities relying “on the ocean and Great Lakes for economic, cultural, spiritual, recreational, and food security

The Groundfish Forum – a Seattle, Washington, U.S.A-based trade group representing five U.S. trawling companies – has sued NOAA Fisheries over a newly adopted plan to reduce halibut bycatch in Bering Sea and Aleutian Island groundfish fisheries.

In November 2023, NOAA Fisheries finalized a rule potentially lowering the annual halibut catch limit for the Amendment 80 sector – a fleet of 20 groundfish-trawling vessels

UPDATE: This story was originally published in October in SeafoodSource’s Key Buyer 2023 Industry Update – Fall Edition. In November, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a one-year Farm Bill extension that will keep many programs running through September 2024.

U.S. lawmakers are pushing for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to play a much larger role in American seafood production, and they’re using the renewal of the Farm

UPDATE: This story was originally published in October in SeafoodSource’s Key Buyer 2023 Industry Update – Fall Edition. Since then, multiple other communities have declared disasters over shrimp imports, the U.S. Department of Commerce and International Trade Commission have launched investigations into shrimp imports, and domestic trade associations have pushed for new legislation to limit shrimp imports.

On 17 August, the city

NOAA Fisheries wants to modernize the way it collects data on Gulf of Mexico shrimp, and it’s looking for early adopters to test out its new system.

For years, the government relied on an electronic logbook system utilizing a 3G cellular network to collect data, but that ended when the 3G protocol was shut down in 2020. In the years since, the government has required U.S. shrimpers to physically submit memory cards for regulators to pull

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has voted to continue investigating frozen warmwater shrimp imports from Ecuador, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam to determine whether the U.S. should implement antidumping and countervailing duties.

The commission’s vote comes after a petition from the American Shrimp Processors Association (ASPA) that claims imports from those four countries are materially harming domestic shrimpers. After the

NOAA Fisheries has released more information from its investigation of the death of 10 killer whales off the coast of Alaska, as well as the serious injury of an eleventh whale.

“Given the high level of incidental catches of killer whales in 2023, we knew it was important to move as quickly as possible to better understand whether these incidental takes pose a conservation concern to any of the potentially affected killer whale