The current trading environment in the seafood industry is incredibly complicated and unpredictable, but Nomi Prins, the keynote speaker at the 2025 Seafood Expo North America (SENA), said the long-term trends are still positive for seafood.
Prins, a macro-economist, geopolitical finance expert, and best-selling author, kicked off SENA’s conference program by highlighting the many different headwinds the seafood industry had to grapple with in 2024.
“There's a lot of headwinds that are accumulating right now, and there’s a lot of dynamics that are changing because of the globality of it and because of geopolitics,” Prins said. “Anything that I’m going to say about tariffs right now could change in 30 seconds; that’s just a fact right now.”
A key factor in how tariffs are affecting the market, as well as the resulting headwinds, is the perception of the tariffs rather than their actual impact.
According to Prins, a lot of the movement in the market has been caused by overreactions when considered in the historical context of the last time similar tariffs were launched in 2018.
Those first tariffs, first launched by U.S. President Donald Trump during his first term in office and, in some cases, either reinstated or ceased by the following presidential administration under Joe Biden, had lasting impacts on the seafood industry in terms of where product is sourced from – and how the supply chain is leveraging tariff loopholes.
The growing number of imports from Vietnam or India instead of China is one example of the changes that have arisen from those tariffs, and the current round of on-and-off tariffs will likely just ...
