In mid-March, somewhere between a fish market and a trade floor, the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center makes a certain sound: ice crates, the low hum of refrigerated display cases, and someone testing a microphone three rooms away. This area has been occupied by Seafood Expo North America every spring for the past forty years. This year, Booth 181: NOAA Fisheries is tucked away between rows of scallop processors and smoked salmon vendors, manned by people who, by Monday afternoon, appeared to have answered the same difficult question forty different ways.
It’s not that NOAA wasn’t ready. A roundtable on trade and inspection standards, panels on offshore aquaculture, and a session centered around the executive order to restore American seafood competitiveness were all part of the agency’s full schedule. On paper, it seems like an organization attempting to prevent a crisis rather than respond to one. In reality, it felt more like office hours than outreach as captains and owners of processing plants wandered toward the booth in between sessions.
Furthermore, the questions weren’t gentle ones. According to NOAA, domestic landings decreased by about a billion pounds between 2019 and 2023. This kind of decline doesn’t remain abstract for long when you’re standing across from someone whose boat spent more days at the dock than it fished during the previous season. Fuel prices continue to rise. Finding and retaining labor is difficult. For those who live beneath them, quotas tighten in ways that seem disconnected from what they are truly witnessing on the water.
The timing becomes intriguing at this point. This spring, NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center has been sending researchers to ports from Maine to North Carolina, including Wanchese, Hatteras, Ocracoke, and Swan Quarter, to conduct the 2026 Commercial Fishing Crew Survey. The survey asks working fishermen, anonymously, about their current lives. It’s a low-key, unglamorous project that seldom garners media attention on its own. However, it begins to appear as two ends of the same endeavor, one gathering data on the ground and the other handling the fallout in a convention hall, when one is seated next to the louder discussion taking place in Boston.
Speaking with those who have been to this expo for years, there’s a feeling that NOAA’s presence with so much programming is a signal in and of itself. The Seafood Inspection Services Portal, EU export certification timelines, and grading standard revisions that exporters have been waiting for for what seems like an eternity were all topics covered in the roundtable on trade and inspection standards. Small details, perhaps, but the kind that determine whether a shipment of scallops passes customs on time or remains in limbo.
The optimistic language of the executive order, “reasserting America’s role as the world’s dominant seafood leader,” contrasts sharply with the more somber tone of those who are actually fishing. The phrase “two million jobs, billions in economic impact” sounds comforting in a press release, but it seems a little hollow when one is standing on a processing floor that has been understaffed all winter. No one at Booth 181 seemed eager to guarantee that the policy would catch up to the pressure quickly, and it is still unclear whether it will.
A macroeconomist explaining tariffs and currency fluctuations to a room full of people more accustomed to discussing bait prices, Nomi Prins‘ return as keynote speaker for the second year in a row added an odd, almost comforting rhythm to the proceedings. It’s an odd combination, but perhaps not the wrong one. More than most industries, seafood is at the intersection of small-town economics and international trade policy.
It was evident that this expo had not resolved much by Tuesday afternoon, when the crowds were dwindling and the ice in the display cases was beginning to look a little worn out. NOAA responded as best it could. The more difficult questions, such as those regarding fuel, quotas, and whether anyone in Washington truly understands the cost of a poor season for a four-person crew, remain unanswered until either next March, the survey results, or both.
