Soon after the U.S. implemented Section 301 tariffs on 60 separate economies in July, American seafood import firms voiced concerns that the new rates left them with few options for relief.
"The new duties stack on top of the normal rates, the antidumping and countervailing duties, and the older China tariffs. For a book like ours, that means the annual duty bill more than doubles,” BSF Chief Vision Officer Mark Frisch told SeafoodSource soon after the tariffs were instituted.
Though the new duty rates target several top seafood-producing nations across the world, such as Norway, Chile, China, Vietnam, and Ecuador, experts have signaled there are some small ways to mitigate their effects.
According to Arlin Wasserman, the CEO and founder of food consultancy firm Changing Tastes, one option that has worked in previous tariff rounds is litigation.
“Just like with the other tariffs, there are a lot of companies, particularly seafood companies, trying to get these overturned,” he said.
Seafood firms have been able to secure varying refunds from previous legal challenges, even as the reimbursement process has been slow and legally challenged by the Trump administration.
Another option for seafood firms to mitigate the effects of the new tariffs is to shift supply chains or, where that’s not possible, work closely with suppliers on pricing, though that represents a delicate balancing act.
“Every food executive is weighing how much to absorb, how much to pass to the customer, and how much to renegotiate up and down the contract chain. Getting that sequencing wrong is where you lose either the margin or the relationship,” Kevin Slaughter, a partner and lead attorney of the corporate practice group at Levenfeld Pearlstein, told The Food Institute. “Prices also tend to be sticky. Even where tariffs have eased, consumers are still seeing elevated shelf prices, which keeps affordability squarely in the conversation.”
David Lennarz, the co-founder and president of consultancy firm Registrar Corp., told SeafoodSource that shifting supply chains are challenging as the country list for Section 301 tariffs is so vast that it is “hard to avoid them,” advising instead that importers try to work with suppliers on pricing.
“What importers have tried to do is negotiate some sort of discount on the purchase price, which is less and less easy as manufactures are finding other sources to sell their products other than the U.S.,” Lennarz said.
Because tariffs have become a mainstay of the Trump administration, food companies and buyers are getting better at how they word contracts to protect themselves from future price hikes, Slaughter said, with many companies invoking price-adjustment contract language for the first time to try to mitigate exposure.
Lennarz added that a tertiary avenue for relief is simply the fact the tariffs are unlikely to be in place long term.
Already, the Liberty Justice Center, which successfully challenged Trump’s tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), filed a lawsuit immediately after the Section 301 tariffs were implemented, and 25 states have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade, denouncing the tariffs as “arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law.”
“These aren’t going to be around forever; these are purely political,” Lennarz said. “The question is, do you stick it out and keep buying from [a certain] source or is there an alternative source [to] not pay the [Section] 301 import fees?”
Regardless, previous tariff rounds have not affected seafood imports too drastically, with Trump’s first round of “Liberation Day” tariffs resulting in little change to food import totals, according to Registrar, which found there has only been a “minor” decline in imports of certain seafood species.
“We all eat three times a day; we are not going to stop eating. The numbers show that, even with tariffs, imports have remained steady across the food industry,” Lennarz said.
