Whether it is food or clothing, people care about where their products come from, for a myriad of reasons. Seafood is no different. Governments, retailers, and customers care about the source of the seafood on their plate as it is an important factor for evaluating the product’s sustainability and whether it aligns with their values. In a new perspective piece published in npj Ocean Sustainability on Feb. 27, 2025, Jessica Gephart worked with a team of researchers to look into a specific case of seafood traceability in relation to US imports after sanctions on Russia.
Seafood was a target of import restrictions imposed by Russia following the first round of sanctions in response to the 2014 invasion of Crimea. The US responded with a Russian seafood import ban as a result of the current war in Ukraine. What the team found was perhaps contrary to what you might expect as a result of international sanctions. “We found that while Russian imports of seafood products from sanctioning countries declined by nearly 60%, this was substituted with increased imports from other countries. Meanwhile, exports of Russia’s own seafood were essentially unaffected, with intermediary countries playing an important role,” said Jessica Gephart, assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences (UW SAFS).
Furthermore, they showed that prior to the US ban on Russian seafood imports, 96% of Russian seafood consumed in the US was imported from a country other than Russia, primarily China. This means that vast majority of Russian seafood destined for the US would likely not indicate that it was harvested by Russia under the current country of origin labeling rules, without additional reporting requirements.
This scenario of how complex trade patterns can elude enforcement efforts in the case of trade restrictions against Russia was revealed using the Aquatic Resource Trade in Species (ARTIS) database, which estimates aquatic food flows by origin and species while accounting for foreign processing. “A key challenge is that when seafood undergoes processing in an intermediate country, such as being processed from a whole fish into a fillet, it becomes a product of the processing country under current rules,” Jessica said. “Without additional requirements to retain information on the harvesting country, we therefore generally lose that information.”
The question remains: how is Russian seafood entering the US after sanctions? The team quantified the pathways through which Russian-harvested products move into the US, revealing that 89% of Russian seafood continued to move through China, with the majority, by volume, being Alaska pollock, Atlantic cod, or pink salmon.
“We chose this trade path because it was, and remains, a current issue. Various stakeholders were calling to close the ‘processing loophole’ for Russian seafood, but what we show is that the processing loophole is substantial in this case, but the existing tools are insufficient for closing it,” Jessica noted. “Through this case, we illustrate the broader traceability challenge for policies aimed at other goals, such as sourcing from sustainable stocks or eliminating illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing from US supply chains, for which knowing who harvested seafood is a critical piece of information.”
Some of the recommendations for strengthening traceability and regulation of seafood imports that emerged from this research include expanding the coverage of existing programs such as the US Seafood Monitoring Program (SIMP). Currently, this program only covers around half of US seafood imports. “The US has been a leader in promoting sustainable fisheries and SIMP represents an important step for ensuring our imported seafood is sourced legally so that our domestic fisheries are competing on a level playing field. Yet, to strengthen the effectiveness of the program, we recommend expanding the program to cover all seafood products, expanding support for the implementation of SIMP, making at least some of the SIMP data publicly available to enable government-researcher collaborations, and coordinate with other nations’ seafood import programs to align data collection so that we can better target seafood import inspections,” Jessica said.
The team involved in this study included four professors from the University of Washington—Jessica Gephart (UW SAFS), Christopher Anderson (UW SAFS), Lorenz Hauser (UW SAFS), and Tabitha Mallory (Jackson School of International Studies)—and scientists from American University, Duke University, John Hopkins University, Simeone Consulting, and University of Florida.