Christopher Seufert photo
By John Pappalardo
People across the nation – the world actually – are considering how President Trump’s dramatic new strategies and priorities will impact their lives and what they care about. We’re no different.
One example: Every year I join fisheries regulators from the United States and Canada to hammer out how the two countries should split up shared fish stocks (cod and haddock of major importance) that range across our maritime border on Georges Bank. The idea is to make sure a division is fair, and that in combination we don’t overfish.
This year we’ve been told that we will not be meeting. How that will affect our fishermen’s ability to harvest is unclear so far.
We’re also aware that many people we have worked with at NOAA, the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, and the New England Fishery Management Council are concerned, to put it mildly. They don’t know if they’ll have jobs, or whether many projects they have championed will exist in a year.
Of even broader import and potential impact is the favored tactic and threat, front and center since the new administration back came into office:
Tariffs.
As both fishermen and consumers of fish, Americans rely on international markets. From the fishermen’s point of view, lobster is the posterchild. Lobster exports from Canada and the United States go all over the world, with China a major market. Economists say about $2 billion worth of what we think of as “American” lobster was exported by the two countries in 2020, more from Canada (around $1.5 billion) with the United States showing around $460 million – all of it from Maine and Massachusetts.
With both Canada and China in the tariff bullseye, and both sending clear signals they will retaliate in kind, what will the lobster industry will look like a year or two from now? If reciprocal tariffs force higher prices overseas, will that cut the legs out from under the market? Will it create a bigger advantage for Canadian lobstermen because their comparable product, minus tariffs, will be cheaper? Then again, will it create more demand domestically and build even stronger US markets?
We’ve been through something like this before, in the first Trump term. Tariffs impacted lobstermen in a big way. But after meeting with industry members in Maine, President Trump got the message and authorized direct payments to lobstermen, based on their landings, to compensate for the damage. It was a significant turnaround, eased a lot of pain with direct checks, but whether that kind of special treatment would happen again is hard to imagine.
Meanwhile, most of us realize that a huge percentage of the fish we eat in this country is imported, probably 80 percent. That could be salmon from Chile, shrimp from Thailand, tilapia from Indonesia (and China). By design, tariffs would increase their costs, intended to help American fishermen compete (and raise federal funding).
Will that work? If cheap foreign seafood becomes 25 percent more expensive, would that drive more American consumers toward domestic fish? If domestic fish now being exported becomes more expensive as two-way tariffs rise, will that depress demand, or create new incentives to push deeper into the American mainstream?
It’s tempting to say that the only certainty about all this is uncertainty, but there are a few other certainties we see.
One is that the American fishing fleet will keep on keeping on, adapting and adjusting to whatever economic and political challenges emerge. History proves this.
The other certainty is that in the final analysis, the more we choose to buy local, and support our fishing community directly, the less tariffs matter. That’s a truth every economist, and people of any political stripe, can appreciate.
John Pappalardo is CEO of The Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance