Today, the bipartisan Safer Shrimp Imports Act was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Mike Ezell (R-MS), Rep. Troy Carter (D-LA), and Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA). The Safer Shrimp Imports Act is the House companion bill of legislation introduced in the Senate (S.667) in February by Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS).
If enacted, the bill would prohibit the importation of shrimp that either originates from a country where the foreign government does not (1) have an agreement with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to facilitate the inspection of foreign facilities; or (2) administer a food inspection system deemed by the FDA to be equivalent to that of the United States.
Unlike virtually all foreign seafood overseen by the FDA, imports of siluriformes (catfish and pangasius) are subject to the equivalency requirements of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Through its equivalency standards, the USDA administers a pre-approval process before authorizing companies to ship foreign siluriformes to the U.S. market. At present, the USDA has authorized just forty-two (42) companies from three countries (China (10); Thailand (3); and Vietnam (29)) for export to the United States.
In contrast, no prior approval is required by the FDA. Last year, the United States imported shrimp from forty-six (46) countries. Hundreds of companies currently export shrimp to the United States, with new companies popping up on a regular basis.
Under this approach, the burden is on the FDA to find shipments of unsafe shrimp imports and stop them at the border. This leads to absurd scenarios where the FDA reports rejecting an entry line of shrimp from the Chinese company “Rudong Zhengxiong Trade Co., Ltd.” on March 21, 2025 for veterinary drug residues and then reports rejecting three entry lines of shrimp from “Zhengxiong (Rudong) Trade Co., Ltd.” on April 15, 2025. In the absence of any equivalence requirement, foreign exporters and U.S. importers can simply slightly alter names of companies to evade scrutiny for unsafe shrimp shipments.
Although the FDA does not administer an equivalence standard for shrimp, the agency finalized an equivalence determination regarding raw molluscan shellfish from Spain and the Netherlands in September 2020. Pursuant to that equivalence determination, the FDA determined that the European Union’s “system of food safety control measures for raw bivalve molluscan shellfish, as implemented by Spain and the Netherlands, along with the application of additional measures specifically adopted for export to the United States, are equivalent to comparable U.S. controls.”
Because there is no equivalence requirement applied to shrimp imports, the FDA does not require “the application of additional measures specifically adopted for export to the United States . . .” for shrimp, although other markets do. In addition to requiring that 50 percent of all shipments of aquacultured goods be tested at the border, the European Union also requires Indian exporters to test all shipments of shrimp for the presence of banned antibiotics prior to exportation. Moreover, a recently released audit report from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety explains that Vietnamese exporters are similarly required to test all shrimp for the presence of veterinary drugs prior to shipment to Europe. These testing requirements mean that shrimp exporters in both India and Vietnam are aware of whether shrimp is contaminated prior to exportation and can choose to ship to markets, like the United States, with weaker food safety controls than Europe.
Separately, the Safer Shrimp Imports Act also instructs the FDA to “enter into arrangements and agreements . . . with the foreign government of each foreign country with” one or more shrimp processor to facilitate inspections of those plants. At present, the FDA conducts, on average, 9,270 inspections of food facilities each year. However, only 917 of those inspections – less than ten percent – are of foreign food facilities, despite the fact that, pursuant to 21 U.S.C. 350j(a)(2)(D), the FDA has been instructed by Congress to conduct inspections of 19,200 foreign food facilities each year. Moreover, because one out of every six inspections conducted by the FDA of food facilities is of a seafood plant, the agency inspects, on average, 1,545 seafood processing plants each year. This means that even if every single foreign facility inspected each year was a seafood plant, over forty percent of the FDA’s inspections of seafood plants are of facilities located in the United States, despite the fact that, according to the agency, 94 percent of all seafood consumed in this country is imported.
“We cannot continue to operate regulatory systems that have higher standards for domestic industries and lower standards for our foreign competitors,” said John Williams, the Executive Director of the Southern Shrimp Alliance. “We are grateful to Representatives Ezell, Carter, and Letlow, as well as Senator Hyde-Smith, for pushing for the application of the same rules to everyone participating in the U.S. shrimp market through the Safer Shrimp Imports Act.”
Review the Safer Shrimp Imports Act here: https://shrimpalliance.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Safer-Shrimp-Imports-Act-House.pdf
Read press release from Rep. Ezell, “Ezell, Carter, Letlow Introduce Bipartisan Safer Shrimp Imports Act” (May 13, 2023) here: https://ezell.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=781
Review European Commission Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety, Final Report of an Audit of Vietnam Carried Out From 24 September to 17 October 2024 in Order to Evaluate Controls on Residues of Pharmacologically Active Substances, Pesticides and Contaminants in Animals and Animal Products, DG(SANTE) 2024-8085, here: https://shrimpalliance.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Final-Report-2024-8085.pdf