As it approaches a decade in force, the overall impact of Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) on defeating illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing – and how its new update to cover all species will help – remains unclear.
It has been eight years since NOAA Fisheries first created SIMP under the administration of then-U.S. President Barack Obama, and the agency has now decided it needs an update.
NOAA’s SIMP program was first introduced as a means of imposing stricter monitoring standards on seafood imports coming into the U.S. and initially targeted at-risk seafood species. As it stands, the program requires detailed information on 13 species or species groups, covering roughly 1,100 individual species, according to the agency.
The stated goal of the program – which originated from work done by the Obama- authorized Presidential Task Force on Combating IUU Fishing and Seafood Fraud – was to block the import of select seafood products that had either been mislabeled or harvested via IUU fishing. The regulatory standards under SIMP were intended to be similar to the standards domestic U.S. fishermen face to create an even playing field between imports and domestic production.
Since being introduced, the program has remained relatively stagnant. In March 2022, NOAA Fisheries told U.S. Congress it was evaluating the program to determine if the species or species groups – abalone, Atlantic cod, Pacific cod, Atlantic blue crab, red king crab, dolphinfish, grouper, sea cucumber, northern red snapper, shark, shrimp, swordfish, and seven species of tuna – it covers were still at risk.
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That first expansion was met with extensive public feedback that ultimately led NOAA Fisheries to withdraw the proposal in November 2023 and instead start a broad review of SIMP.
Since that failure, NOAA said it gathered feedback from more than 7,000 stakeholders to redo and revamp SIMP. In November 2024, it unveiled an action plan containing a number of goals, including enabling pre-entry screening, developing a pilot government-to-government import data program, and expanding SIMP traceability requirements to all U.S. imports.
“Our goals are to strengthen the U.S. domestic seafood industry by promoting fair trade practices in the global seafood supply chain while building capacity to maintain and grow the program,” then-NOAA Administrator Richard Spinrad said.
Spinrad noted that the new updates are intended to deter and prevent IUU fish and seafood products from entering the U.S. supply chain – but whether it will manage to do so is still unclear.
Goldfish Co-Founder and CEO Celeste Leroux, who worked with NOAA and the White
“It reads to me as not that cohesive, not to say that these actions are unhelpful, but the fact that the sort of ‘next steps’ at the bottom of the report is just three sentences tells me that this wasn’t much of an action plan as an action statement,” she told SeafoodSource. “For example, they list these goals here in order, but I would say goal four, the last goal on the list, is the one about making the program work as intended. Are we going to be checking information at scale? Are we going to be making sure that it does what it was designed to do?”
Goal four in the action plan, “Improve NOAA Fisheries’ implementation of SIMP and build our capacity to maintain and grow the program,” is a key factor in whether SIMP works in the first place, Leroux said.
“To me, you would want to demonstrate capacity in that area first and use it to justify the types of changes they are recommending,” Leroux said. “I don’t want to say that these goals are unhelpful – they may be – but they don’t seem to be ordered in a logical way that makes me believe NOAA is going to do these things.”
The seafood industry in the U.S. has been ...
