The administration of U.S. Donald Trump has set plans in motion to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in a move that some experts are warning will have long-lasting effects on the U.S.’s own seafood sector.
Kevin Fitzsimmons, an aquaculture specialist and an environmental science professor at the University of Arizona, has consulted on USAID aquaculture projects in Myanmar, among other locations, and said that the recent funding freeze will have negative ripple effects across the globe.
“Efforts to carefully control overharvesting of fisheries resources and efforts put forth by aquaculture projects to become more careful with available resources are being cut. The short-term gains for deregulating fisheries will be followed by overharvest in coming years. The de-regulators will certainly have moved on before having to accept any blame,” he told SeafoodSource. “The U.S. aquaculture sector, meanwhile, will suffer from a lack of trained staff in coming years and research on improved techniques, technologies, and new species will be delayed. Countries that continue to invest in fisheries and aquaculture will reap the benefits, and U.S. industries will fall further back behind China, Vietnam, Europe, and others.”
As for Fitzsimmons’s own projects, he has seen their budgets “shredded” by the cuts to U.S. foreign aid spending and sees even further cuts pending.
“This entails frozen funds, staff layoffs, and scrambling around to find alternative funding for students. One of my projects was canceled ‘with no opportunity for appeal of the decision.’ In another, the funds are frozen, and the USAID person coordinating the program has been ordered to return to the U.S.,” he said. “In the larger sphere, projects are being canceled and frozen that affect all kinds of fisheries and aquaculture efforts. I have been on the phone with and emailed various agencies and project leaders, and the most common response is, ‘I wish I knew more and could answer your questions.’ There seems to have been no planning or thought given to process or procedure.”
Fitzsimmons added that even though some project contracts have wording about reimbursement, the lack of planning or thought given to process or procedure to which he referred leaves that possible compensation in limbo...
