On April 17, 2025, President Donald Trump signed a new Executive Order (“EO”) building upon a previous EO, Promoting American Seafood Competitiveness and Economic Growth, which was issued by his prior administration on May 7, 2020. The new EO directs the Secretary of Commerce, the United States Trade Representative (“USTR”), and the Interagency Seafood Trade Task Force to assess seafood competitiveness issues and jointly develop a comprehensive seafood trade strategy. This strategy will require the USTR to examine the relevant trade practices of major seafood-producing nations, including the use of forced labor in the seafood supply chain, and pursue appropriate solutions, including under section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.
The new EO further directs the Secretary of Commerce to identify within 30 days the most heavily regulated fisheries, including farmed species, and take action to reduce compliance costs. The order also mandates a review of recent expansions to the Seafood Import Monitoring Program, focusing on enforcement of high-risk shipments from countries that are believed to routinely engage in illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. The President also instructed the Secretary of Commerce to develop options for deploying improved technology to identify such foreign fisheries-related violations.
In addition, the new EO tasks the National Marine Fisheries Service with expanding exempted fishing permits and incorporating more cost-effective technologies and cooperative research into stock assessments. The EO also calls for a review of marine national monuments to evaluate whether any could be opened to commercial fishing, a move that is likely to face significant pushback from conservation groups.
Finally, under the new EO, the Secretaries of Commerce and of Agriculture are also broadly tasked with developing and implementing an “America First Seafood Strategy” to promote production, marketing, sale, and export of U.S. fishery and aquaculture products and strengthen domestic processing capacity.
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