Bill to Expand SIMP Passes Out of Committee; NCBFAA Says It's Unworkable
A bill that would add more data elements a year after passage to the Seafood Import Monitoring Program passed out of the Natural Resources Committee by voice vote Oct. 13. The bill's authors recently received a letter from the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America saying that the bill would be "crushing to the import process." The letter, sent Oct. 8, also said, "No one wants illegal or fraudulent seafood, or seafood produced by forced labor, to enter the United States. Certainly, our industry is strongly committed to safe and legally compliant supply chains. Compliance is what we do. The challenge is: how best to ensure integrity in seafood supply chains. SIMP already collects more data at entry than just about any other agency for 1,100 species of seafood."
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The legislation was amended in the committee, and does initially focus on regulators developing "a strategy to improve the quality and verifiability of already collected Seafood Import Monitoring Program Message Set." The bill was co-sponsored by Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., and Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., and also has the support of House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee Chairman Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore.
But if it were to become law, a year after its passage, it would add more requirements, such as a chain-of-custody record that includes "transshippers, processors, storage facilities, and distributors and the physical address of such facilities"; the beneficial owner of each vessel or seafood farm; advance notice of the data at least 72 hours ahead of entry; and certification in foreign countries of the harvest, landing, processing and transshipment.
The NCBFAA said that "when a typical shipment of canned seafood arrives in the U.S., it may consist of 20 containers holding 60,000 tins," and that one entry requires more than 1,000 data elements to be typed in if you add 15 more data elements. They said that providing the complete chain of custody data and certificates at every transfer is "wildly unrealistic when you consider that the seafood contained in a typical shipment can easily involve 10 or 12 (or more) separate supply chains. ... You cannot 'data' your way out of [illegal, unreported and unregulated] fishing or forced labor practices. Piling on another 20, 50 or 100 data elements at entry will not lead to more compliant seafood chains or enable NOAA to stop illegal imports. The existing data requirements at entry are already detailed and demanding. More is not necessarily better."