The Trump Administration announced a 90-day pause on shrimp and other tariffs, dropping the effective rate to 10% to allow for negotiations on trade, trade barriers, tariffs, currency manipulation, and non-monetary tariffs. The Southern Shrimp Alliance responds:
“It is encouraging that the Trump Administration’s tariffs have prompted countries to show a new willingness to address trade policies disadvantaging American producers. We want to compete in a market where competitors cannot use intolerable practices like forced labor and banned antibiotics to undercut us,” said John Williams, executive director of the Southern Shrimp Alliance. “For shrimpers, tariffs respond to an urgent need to offset unfair trade. After decades of U.S.-supported investment in foreign shrimp aquaculture, it’s time to support our well-regulated, healthful, sustainable domestic shrimp industry instead. Failing to act immediately risks outsourcing America’s most consumed seafood to industries that engage in horrible practices and losing our commercial domestic shrimp industry.”
Supporting Facts:
- According to NOAA Fisheries, the total value of the U.S. shrimp fishermen’s catch fell from $522 million in 2021 to $268 million in 2023, and remain near historically low values.
- Since 2014, the U.S. Treasury has voted to support more than 70 shrimp and aquaculture development projects through international financial institutions like the World Bank. Billions of dollars have supported foreign shrimp aquaculture development, primarily in the largest supplying countries of India and Ecuador. And, predictably, there is a corresponding increase in low-cost shrimp supplied from these countries to the United States. (More on IFI-funding of shrimp aquaculture)
- In 2024, multiple human rights groups, investigative journalists, and government agencies called out evidence of forced labor in the world’s shrimp supply chains. The Department of Labor added India, the largest supplier of shrimp to the U.S. market (42% of all imports), to its 2024 List of Goods Produced with Child or Forced Labor. (More on reports of forced labor)
- Last year, the governments of three major seafood importing markets–the US, EU, and Japan–once again found that farmed shrimp from India and Vietnam present unique risks of contamination with banned antibiotics–those that are our drugs of last resort against bacteria. The Ocean Outlaw Project found that shrimp known to be contaminated with banned antibiotics were directed to the U.S. market, which has the lowest level of testing. (More on findings of antibiotics)