NOAA Fisheries has unveiled an action plan for its Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) that the agency said has a renewed focus on combating illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, enhancing seafood traceability, and expanding traceability requirements to all U.S. seafood imports.
NOAA first created SIMP in 2016 under the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama as a means of imposing stricter monitoring of seafood imports, requiring at-risk seafood species to be tracked to its source and properly labeled. NOAA announced a major proposal on 28 December 2022 that would have doubled the species the program targets – a push that ultimately failed after NOAA decided to withdraw the additional rules in November 2023.
NOAA said since that time, it has gathered feedback from more than 7,000 stakeholders to create the recently unveiled action plan, which it said will help make the program more effective while also supporting the seafood industry by minimizing disruptions to trade.
“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,” NOAA Administrator and Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere Richard Spinrad said in a release. “Once implemented, the changes to our Seafood Import Monitoring Program that we are announcing will fundamentally improve our ability to prevent and deter IUU fish and fish products from entering our market and will contribute to U.S. government efforts to address labor abuses in the seafood supply chain.”
SIMP has been criticized in the past by members of the seafood industry and even people who worked on it for not living up to its objective of adequately screening seafood or preventing IUU-sourced seafood from entering the country. Celeste Leroux, who worked with NOAA and the White House to implement SIMP and is the co-founder and CEO of traceability firm Goldfish, told SeafoodSource in October 2023 that the program wasn’t functioning as intended.
“This was a program I was involved with setting up, and you would be hard-pressed to find someone more critical of it,” she said at the time.
NOAA said the new action plan will address some of those criticisms by expanding SIMP to all species and enabling pre-entry screening of SIMP imports. NOAA is also working on a pilot program to create a voluntary government-to-government import data program and is planning to modify the current key data elements (KDEs) required under SIMP to harmonize its requirement with other domestic and international traceability schemes.
NOAA said it is also improving SIMP compliance materials and is planning to introduce a new rule to clarify SIMP’s permits and reporting procedures to make it more user-friendly.
Part of that push will include a ...
