NCBFAA Tells Congress SIMP Expansion Unworkable

The Seafood Import Monitoring Program Expansion that was going to be in the bipartisan infrastructure bill did not become law, but H.R. 3075 passed out of the House Natural Resources Committee in October, and the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America is warning the majority leader that he should not schedule a vote in the chamber for the bill.

NCBFAA President Jan Fields said that SIMP is aiming to combat forced labor on fishing boats and illegal or unregulated fishing, but even the current law is not well tailored to that aim.

"The current SIMP program shows a poor understanding of real world supply chain operations and does not reflect the fact that a vast amount of seafood imports originate from aquaculture sources, not the ocean," she wrote Dec 14. "For example, for shrimp imports, the current structure of data input requires a significant amount of repetitive data to be entered into the automated commercial environment (ACE) again and again from each aquaculture source based on the various sizes of the shrimp. With anywhere from 1 to 100+ aquaculture sources for one shipment of shrimp entering the U.S., it is a massive quantity of data. An NCBFAA member noted that one shipment was estimated to require 18,000 data elements to be manually entered!"

For the species of fish covered by SIMP, brokers report the ship's name and country flag, where the fish was caught and with what gear, and where the fish was processed. "A single fishing vessel may be out at sea for six to eight weeks at a time catching up to 350 tons of fish from 20 to 30 different locations. A typical imported shipment of canned seafood may easily have originated from 10 or 12 different vessels catching fish from over a hundred different locations," she said, which means thousands of data points.

The expansion would be worse, she said, since it would require complete chain of custody data with names and addresses of each party that handled the fish, as well as the beneficial owner of each one of those companies. This would cover foreign truckers, warehouses, distributors and so on. All this would be required 72 hours before the shipment arrives.

"[I]n some cases, fresh seafood is caught, shipped by air and consumed within a 72-hour period! Finally, the legislation also requires a certificate from a competent authority to be provided for every transfer point in the supply chain. These requirements at the point of entry are wildly unrealistic... ."