The European Union’s Market Advisory Council (MAC) acknowledged that there have been difficulties in rolling out the bloc’s CATCH digital certification system and improvements must be made to ensure the initiative’s long-term success.
“Food business operators (FBOs) have identified a number of recurring operational, technical, and administrative challenges arising during the early implementation phase, particularly affecting supply chains dependent on time-sensitive imports and complex sourcing structures, characteristic of long value chains,” MAC stated in a 31 July report. “The same has been identified and reported by Member States.”
Approved in 2023 and entering into effect in January 2026, CATCH requires digital certificates for all fishery product imports to the E.U. listing information such as location, gear type used for harvest, date of the fishing trip, and vessel identification numbers. Advocates argue that replacing paper-based processes with the digital system is key for cracking down on illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, ensuring that all seafood exported to the E.U. can be traced back to its origin.
However, the rollout of CATCH has been heavily criticized by the fishing industry and some E.U. member states, which argue that the system has created more bureaucracy with unworkable requirements for already struggling commercial fishers. For instance, while CATCH has been promoted as digitized record keeping, records are not digitally entered into the system at every step of the supply chain. That results in exporters being forced to manually copy all of the traceability data from paper records into CATCH before sending it to Europe, and in cases where third countries lack the capacity for digitization, the burden falls on E.U. operators.
“Operators report significant administrative workload linked to the manual transcription of third country documentation into CATCH,” MAC said. “It is reported that processing a single catch certificate may require between 50 minutes and several hours, increasing the risk of retranscription errors and requiring the reallocation of operational staff to compliance-related tasks.”
MAC has also documented several technical limitations with entering data into the CATCH system, such as mismatched gear classifications or restrictive data entries. In one example, MAC reported the struggles of an exporter entering a frozen sockeye shipment into CATCH. The shipment included salmon that had been harvested from 454 fishing vessels and collected through 44 tender vessels. Although the salmon included the necessary traceability information through 2,970 fish tickets, CATCH has a maximum vessel entry of 26 vessels.
The Alaska seafood community has issued warnings about CATCH, claiming that the system is not built to incorporate traceability data from its commercial salmon fisheries, despite that traceability data existing in other formats. In July, the E.U. extended the deadline for U.S. companies to comply with CATCH.
MAC also noted that implementation of CATCH has not occurred consistently across E.U. states, creating inconsistencies and uncertainty for businesses.
“Divergent implementation practices risk fragmenting import procedures ... and creating unequal operational conditions between ports and Member States,” the council noted.
MAC recommended that the European Commission issue guidance to make CATCH implementation more consistent across member states and strengthen coordination between the various levels of governance within the E.U.
Interoperability and digital integrations should be a central component of CATCH to address many of the issues raised, MAC concluded. For example, automatic text recognition that can autofill fields by reading paper documents would reduce the reliance on manual entry, and the council pointed to the forthcoming development of the E.U. Single Window Environment for Customs as a key enabler of interoperability across digital systems.
“MAC considers that the long-term success of CATCH depends on ensuring operational stability, proportionate and consistent implementation across the Union, legal certainty for operators and authorities, and the progressive development of interoperability both within the Union and with relevant third-country systems,” the council stated.
