Representatives of Alaska’s commercial fishing sector claim the European Union’s new digital CATCH requirements – intended to enhance traceability and cut down on illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing – will be disastrous for the state’s salmon sector.
“It should be disappointing to everyone that this has gotten to where it is. The U.S. and E.U. should be the model for how to do these things right,” National Fisheries Institute Executive Vice President for Government Affairs and General Counsel Robert DeHaan said at the 2026 Seafood Expo Global (SEG), taking place from 21 to 23 April. “The way this is unfolding should disappoint all of us, and it’s going to cost jobs in our sector in the United States.”
Approved by the E.U. in 2023, CATCH is a digital traceability system introduced to provide greater transparency for European consumers on where seafood imports originate. The system requires documentation tracking fish from the moment they are caught, with importers being able to see exactly where a fish was harvested, what vessel harvested it, and what gear was used to harvest it. CATCH finally launched in January, although some of its more stringent requirements won’t go into effect until July 2026.
The Alaska seafood sector claims that the regulation – as written – would “lead to near bans” on Alaskan salmon products due to how the fisheries aggregate catches from small vessels before delivering them to processors.
“You have small boats harvesting in a place like Bristol Bay, delivering to tenders, and those tenders delivering to shoreside plants. By the time that product has been processed in a shoreside plant, it could have come from any one of the vessels that participated,” At-sea Processors Association CEO Matt Tinning said at SEG. “There is no sustainability concerns, so the original ask of the E.U. to get a written signature from the captain that moves with the specific salmon that they originally caught – that’s just not a proportionate response to a sustainability concern.”
On 20 April, Seafood Europe, ASMI, PSPA, APA, and NFI issued a joint call for an extended grace period to find an alternative path for Alaska’s salmon sector to comply with CATCH.
“I would say overall, everyone is saying either that this adds a ton of work and we can do it, or this adds a lot of work and as a result we are not going to do it, which means not exporting to the European Union,” Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute Communications Director Greg Smith said. “As currently implemented and currently planned, there are some fisheries that it’d be so impractical to try to do the documentation that no one will. Traceability is important, but Alaska and the U.S. – but certainly Alaska – doesn’t have illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing.”
Aside from time constraints, Smith added that guidelines remain unclear to fishers about how to report, when to report, and what ramifications may exist for incorrect reporting. Additionally, documentation requires the specification of how the fish will be used, which is not always applicable for exporters of raw materials. The commercial fishing season is set to start in late May in some areas of Alaska, like Bristol Bay. There, the season is abbreviated to just 6-8 weeks, meaning the 1 July grace period would expire at the peak of the commercial fishing season.
“The complexity and volume of Bristol Bay and the fact that there’s 1,600 boats – and to make operations efficient for our fishery, the supply chain goes from boats to tenders, and then to processing, so there’s concern,” Bristol Bay Regional Development Seafood Association Executive Director Lilani Dunn said at SEG.
“Trying to get the documents from a fisherman as they’re working, fishing nearly around the clock with short openers, that’s just not going to be functional,” Smith said. “Trying to put on this one size fits all approach is just proving incredibly burdensome in some cases and completely unworkable in others.”
Dunn suggested extending the grace period to 18 months or considering the tenders as the first point of contact instead of the fishing vessels. That way, operations could continue for set netters, comminglers, and individual vessels could continue to fish rapidly and send raw catch to the tender for processing and paperwork, instead of delaying the fishers at the vessel point.
“The information on these new rules, they’re learning of it in real time and there’s more details we need to figure out,” Dunn said. “Because of our shorter season, being the largest volume in wild salmon fisheries and the fact that we have 1,600 small boat operators in a six-week period delivering close to 40 million salmon, the administrative work not only in preparation to a June start, but even during the season, that’s extremely cumbersome.”
NOAA Fisheries Representative to the E.U. Stéphane Vrignaud, who was also at SEG, said the federal government was working with European regulators to address the discrepancy.
“We are in agreement with the objectives of the system: traceability, transparency, the eradication of IUU fishing. We share the same principles. We’ve been engaged with the E.U. over the last two years to discuss the better way to make this system reflect the reality of our fisheries which it does not right now,” Vrignaud said. “We are still engaging with [the European Commission]. I cannot tell you the level of progress, but we are engaged fully to support our industry, to make it work.”
