$2.4 billion in illegally caught seafood enters the U.S. annually, undercutting domestic fishermen who follow the rules

The United States imported an estimated $2.4 billion worth of seafood derived from illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing in 2019 — representing nearly 11% of total U.S. seafood imports and over 13% of imports caught at sea. Globally, IUU fishing accounts for about 20% of total catch, and in some regions it reaches 50%. The top sources of IUU imports to the U.S. are China, Russia, Mexico, Vietnam, and Indonesia. For domestic fishermen, IUU imports create an impossible competitive dynamic. A U.S. fisherman operating legally must comply with catch limits, gear restrictions, seasonal closures, observer requirements, and reporting mandates — all of which cost money and constrain output. An IUU operator in another country ignores all of these rules, catches as much as they want with whatever gear they want, and sells the product into the same U.S. market at lower prices. The legal fisherman absorbs the costs of sustainability; the illegal operator free-rides on the resource and undercuts on price. This is not a theoretical concern — the Southern Shrimp Alliance has documented how dumped, illegally caught foreign shrimp has driven down prices for U.S. wild-caught shrimp to the point where Gulf Coast shrimpers cannot cover their operating costs. The ecological damage compounds the economic harm. When IUU-caught fish enters the market alongside legally caught fish, it inflates apparent supply and depresses prices, which reduces the economic incentive for legal fishing. Meanwhile, the IUU catch itself is depleting fish stocks that legal fishermen depend on. It is a double hit: less fish in the water and lower prices at the dock. This problem persists because the U.S. Seafood Import Monitoring Program only covers 13 species groups, leaving the majority of imported seafood unmonitored. Tracing the origin of seafood through complex global supply chains — where a fish caught in one country may be processed in a second, repackaged in a third, and sold in a fourth — is technically difficult and resource-intensive. Customs and Border Protection lacks the capacity to inspect more than a small fraction of seafood shipments. The fundamental structural issue is that the U.S. imports 70–85% of its seafood but has no comprehensive system to verify that those imports were legally caught.