Alaska Republican Senator Dan Sullivan said he is heading to Brussels later this month to press European Union leadership to ban Russian seafood imports.
He told an audience during Kodiak’s annual commercial fishing trade show ComFish that he would press EU trade officials on "not only an importation ban of Russian seafood," but to address a situation where "Russian fishermen are actually selling fish in European markets and referring to their fish as Alaskan fish."
Sullivan, who led the government's effort to close a loophole that was allowing Russia-origin seafood reprocessed in China to enter the US market, said the Alaska seafood industry remains in an "economic war with Russia." The country continues to import seafood to Europe, Japan and other key global markets.
"We're going to try and get our European allies to step up and work with us on closing off these Russian fish supplies that are driving down prices all over the world," he said.
The EU now imposes tariffs on Russian fish heading into the 27-nation trading bloc via China, but has not instituted an outright ban as did the United States.
One area where US Alaska pollock producers in particular are up against Russia is selling surimi into Japan.
The challenging surimi market is likely to linger as Russia's move into Asian markets has also been accelerated by the US government’s executive order to ban Russian-origin pollock and other key species from entering the US market via China.
A fish focus at the USDA
Another major focus of Sullivan's speech at ComFish was the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) playing a larger role in stabilizing US seafood markets.
The senator pointed to legislation called the National Seafood Supply Act that would insert a whole new section in the USDA "focused on fishermen and fish programs."
"The USDA in many ways was set up to help American farmers," Sullivan said, pointing to aid such as crop insurance and trade adjustments the agency provides farmers to de-risk their operations.
For the past several years, labor shortages, global market disruptions, aging infrastructure and consolidation have disrupted the US seafood industry, with not only fishermen but entire communities in Alaska fearing the reverberations of recent plant closures.
"Those are big programs. Those are multi-billion dollar programs for American farmers. But what about the farmers of the sea?" he asked. "What about the big challenges that we face in our fishing communities that have many of the analogous problems? Well, there's not programs to do that. There are very few programs that are analogous."
Sullivan said the effort to get more help from the USDA remains an "uphill battle" as some farmers fear they will lose agency resources if fishermen gain more.
"But to me, there's a strong element of fairness here," he said.
