By Tony D’Aoust / For The Herald
To the extent that the general public thinks about where their seafood comes from, they probably imagine people like me, a family salmon fisherman born and raised in Washington who works his own boat near the Alaska shore and who treats his fish with great care.
It is important to me that customers know where I caught the fish I sell them. That’s why I include a map with an arrow, showing “Your fish was caught here.” I bleed all the fish I catch, and rarely do they even hit the deck of my boat; they go straight from the net into ice cold water to stay as fresh as possible. I sell some of my catch to a local processor who insists on high-quality practices, and the rest I’ll ship directly to customers or sell through a community-supported organic farm.
This is the way many people expect their food to arrive to their plates. But in reality, much of the seafood bought or served in the United States is the result of a very different process; caught by factory trawlers operating far out at sea, manned by mistreated crews (often assembled through human trafficking networks), who process thousands of pounds of catch a day, prioritizing today’s profits over the long-term health of the ocean and the sustainability of fish that will feed future generations. And then there is the rampant forced and child labor in seafood processing.
I’m not opposed to bigger fishing operations; what’s not fair to U.S. consumers is mislabeled and misleading seafood, and outlaw fishing operations that use forced labor and ignore local, regional and international regulations.
Billions of dollars of seafood caught by these kinds of operations are imported into the United States every year, yet lawmakers have repeatedly failed to stop it. It took a war in Ukraine for the U.S. to talk about banning seafood from Russia, a significant exporter of illegally caught product. And while the goal of the ban is laudable, the irony is that the United States’ seafood traceability regulations are so incomplete that they cannot be enforced. The Biden administration announced new steps to combat illegal fishing and forced labor in the seafood industry in June, but those actions are far from sufficient to stop these practices.
The net result is that consumers are unwittingly supporting human rights abuses and illegal fishing operations with their hard-earned cash. It’s unfair to them and it’s unfair to fishermen like me and others who play by the rules when we have to go up against this kind of unfair competition.
The United States has the power to close the gaps that let this kind of seafood into U.S. markets in the first place. There have been some efforts in Congress to do just this, notably the comprehensive IUU— Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated — provisions of the COMPETES Act. We need commonsense seafood traceability requirements that cover all imported seafood and vessel transparency requirements, both issues covered by that legislation.
On my boat here in Alaska, I’m required to report ample information about my catch to the government. Yet many of our foreign competitors aren’t held to the same standard. Until our lawmakers get serious about cracking down on illegal fishing imports, they are allowing unethical operations to undercut American fishermen and our ability to compete. And if American consumers actually knew where the seafood they were buying came from, most would prefer to support operations like mine.
Tony D’Aoust was raised on Bainbridge Island in Washington state. In season, he runs his own fishing boat in southeast Alaska and moonlights as a research technician on research vessels in the off-season.
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