U.S. Fish Imports From China Fund Russia's Ukraine Invasion

A US ban on seafood imports from Russia over its invasion of Ukraine was supposed to sap billions of dollars from Vladimir Putin’s war machine. But shortcomings in import regulations mean that Russian-caught pollock, salmon, and crab are likely to enter the US anyway, by way of the country vital to seafood supply chains across the world: China.

Photo Insert: Among Russia’s biggest exports is Alaska pollock.

Like the US seafood industry, Russian companies rely heavily on China to process their catch, Joshua Goodman and Helen Wieffering reported for the Associated Press (AP) on April 16, 2022. Once there, the seafood can be re-exported to the US as a “product of China” because country of origin labeling isn’t required.

The result is that nearly a third of the wild-caught fish imported from China is estimated to have been caught in Russian waters, according to an International Trade Commission (ITC) study of 2019 data. For pollock and sockeye salmon, the rate is even higher — 50% to 75%.

“China doesn’t catch cod. They don’t catch pollock. But yet, they’re one of the largest exporters of these whitefish in the world,” said Sally Yozell, a former policy director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who now is a senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington. “Having it labeled as a Chinese product is really not fair to the consumers and to restaurants.”

Fishing is big business in Russia and is linked to the Kremlin and Putin’s projection of power at sea. Russia is a top seafood producer and was the eighth-largest exporter to the US last year, with more than $1.2 billion, mostly king crab. But it’s unknown how much manages to land in the US via China, which sent $1.7 billion to the US last year. The ban does not require firms importing from China to find out.

Among Russia’s biggest exports is Alaska pollock. A cousin of cod, pollock is used for imitation crabmeat to McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish. Every year, floating factories in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska catch 1.5 million metric tons of the fish.

US trade data analyzed by the AP show that the biggest importer of Russian-caught pollock from China last year was High Liner Foods, whose shares are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Other big importers include Gloucester, Massachusetts-based F.W. Bryce, a subsidiary of Japanese seafood conglomerate Nissui, Miami-based Quirch Foods, and Newport, Rhode Island-based Endeavor Seafood, whose founding partner, Todd Clark, served until 2020 as chairman of the National Fisheries Institute, the industry’s main lobby group.

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