Members of China’s seafood industry aren’t expecting the reelection of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency to have a profound impact on their sector, given the impact already felt during the president-elect’s prior administration.
During Trump’s first term as president, he implemented tariffs on Chinese goods beginning in 2018, which began at 10 percent for some goods and ultimately escalated to a wider scope of products and eventually increased in some cases to as high as 25 percent on billions of dollars of goods. Xubing Fan, the CEO of Beijing, China-based seafood marketing consultancy Seabridge International, said that most Chinese companies already adapted to tariffs after Trump’s prior term.
“I think the previous 25 percent import tax Trump added on China's products including seafood dramatically restrained Chinese seafood exports to the U.S., including farmed tilapia and catfish fillets,” Fan said.
Fan said many seafood exporters sought business elsewhere and didn’t return to the U.S. after.
“Currently, in U.S. supermarkets, you will find much less Chinese farmed, caught, or processed seafood,” Fan said. “China is no longer an important seafood-exporting country to the U.S. So, I think the necessity to further increase the import tax upon Chinese seafood in the future is low.”
Fan said another factor is the U.S. ban on Russian seafood. U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order in 2022 that was later expanded in December 2023 to include Russian-originated seafood processed in third countries, including China.
“The U.S. ban on China-processed Russian seafood like pollock fillets and wild salmon fillets also caused a significant reduction of China's processed seafood exports to the U.S.,” Fan said.
Didier Boon, CEO of Beijing-based seafood trading firm East China Seas, told SeafoodSource that a Trump presidency could be damaging for tilapia exporters but likely won’t have any impact on China’s exports of other products like shrimp. China only exported 7.9 million pounds of shrimp to the U.S. in 2023 – a decline from 2022 and far behind exports from top countries like Ecuador, India, and Indonesia.
“For tilapia, it would be a big problem, even though Latin America will carry on taking huge quantities of it,” Boon said. “Vannamei is already taxed at 95 percent, and little more can happen.”
Boon said there’s still uncertainty over whether Trump will implement the tariffs or not, given the potential impacts on the average consumer and on the U.S. seafood industry.
“It is also possible that intelligent economists, Republican or not, will explain in details what it means for the common guy in the U.S. if huge tariffs are imposed, as any price increase would directly go to the pocket of those poor guys who could afford tilapia but not cod or sole,” Boon said. “They also may explain to [Trump] that retaliation from many countries would completely halt U.S. seafood exports to China, which is already taking a huge part of it.”
Exporters in both countries will have to wait and see, he said, adding Trump is “so erratic that nobody can guess what the real thing will be” and that it is one thing to make populist promises and another thing to put them into action.
China has sought to diversity its sources of food imports away from an earlier reliance on Western suppliers, particularly since the previous Trump administration. Trump’s tariffs were imposed in part on national security grounds, with the justification being the U.S. needed to delink from Chinese technology – a policy which was largely continued by the Biden administration.
The result, Reuters reported, is that China will be in a better position to impose tariffs on U.S. farmed goods without impacting its own food security.
