The average American consumes about twenty pounds of seafood annually. That may seem insignificant, but depending on who you ask and how they calculate it, between 64 and 94 percent of it comes from abroad. Vietnamese and Indian shrimp. Chinese tilapia. Thai canned tuna. Chilean and Canadian salmon. The supply chain is massive, dispersed, and remarkably under-monitored, based on recent analyses. Most customers seem to believe that someone is monitoring everything. The unsettling reality is that very few are.
The U.S. IUU Fishing and Labor Rights Coalition published a policy brief in May 2026 that presented numbers that are hard to ignore. The US imported $25 billion worth of seafood in 2024. Of that, more than $15 billion, or more than 60% by value, entered the nation without being subject to NOAA’s Seafood Import Monitoring Program’s (SIMP) reporting requirements. With the stated goal of growing, the program was created in 2016 to cover the first thirteen species groups. Not a single new species has been added in the past ten years. The delay may be due to bureaucratic inertia, but the result remains the same: billions of dollars’ worth of seafood arriving at American ports without traceability requirements or catch documentation.
The gaps are not merely hypothetical. They have established a “back door” for illicit goods, according to one governance expert. Imports of species that are visually similar to covered species but are not covered by SIMP have increased dramatically; for example, imports of northern red snapper substitutes have increased by nearly four times, while imports of Atlantic blue crab lookalikes have increased by more than eight times. Seafood can be mislabeled as a non-covered species by dishonest actors, who can also completely avoid oversight. The proprietors of a historic Biloxi restaurant in Mississippi were found guilty of selling more than 29 tons of imported fish that were mislabeled as local Gulf catch between 2013 and 2019. A significant Gulf Coast wholesaler was convicted of sixteen years of similar fraud. These are not one-off occurrences. According to studies, between 16 and 75 percent of seafood in the United States is mislabeled; this range is so broad that it practically acknowledges that no one has a firm grasp on the issue.
In the meantime, the FDA, which is in charge of ensuring the safety of imported seafood, has repeatedly fallen short of its own inspection goals. Every year, the organization seeks to inspect 19,200 foreign seafood facilities. It averaged 917 annually between 2018 and 2023. That represents about 5% of the objective. Part of the shortfall can be explained by logistical challenges, a lack of workers, and what a Government Accountability Office report kindly referred to as “unrealistic targets”. However, as a result, enormous amounts of farmed fish from nations with weak safety regulations find their way into American supermarkets with little examination. A portion of it was raised under circumstances that would be prohibited in the country. Some of it contains drug residues or prohibited antibiotics that are prohibited by US regulations.
New tariffs that could further complicate matters are layered on top of all of this. Prices are rising overall due to tariffs of 145 percent on Chinese seafood, 25 percent on Canadian imports, and 10 percent or more on shipments from Vietnam and India. The United States imported 769 million pounds of seafood from China in 2024 alone, which is more than two pounds per person. Of those pounds, 266 million came from tilapia, the fourth most popular fish in America. The USDA’s own recommendations advise Americans to eat more seafood rather than less, and it’s still unclear whether domestic producers can meet even a small portion of that demand.
The irony is piercing. Rising costs will disproportionately affect low-income consumers, who already consume less seafood and lower-quality omega-3 sources than wealthier Americans. Patients with cardiovascular disease who have been advised by their physicians to consume more fish will incur higher expenses if they do so. One to two servings of seafood per week lowers the risk of coronary death by 36%, according to a well-known JAMA study. That figure is irrelevant to tariffs. There is a perception that policymakers are completely ignoring the public health aspect of seafood and treating it like any other trade commodity. There has always been a regulatory gap. However, the combination of aggressive tariffs, widespread mislabeling, stalled traceability programs, and unsuccessful inspections has made it more difficult to turn a blind eye. Accountability vanishes somewhere between the dockside and the dinner plate, leaving Americans to rely on a system that is, by all accounts, ineffective.
