An Emergent Seafood Nationalism Takes Hold in the United States

ABSTRACT This paper introduces the concept of ‘seafood nationalism’ to describe how, since 2024–2025, the United States increasingly uses tariffs, trade remedies, food safety enforcement and origin‐based rules to favour American seafood over foreign products. Federal actions include Executive Order 14276, Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness , which directs agencies to address unfair trade practices, unsafe imports and to develop a coordinated seafood trade strategy. Additional measures include a tariff package imposing a 10% duty on nearly all seafood imports and 30% on seafood from China, as well as new anti‐dumping and countervailing duty orders on warm‐water shrimp. This paper presents Gulf shrimp as a clear example of ‘shrimp survival nationalism’, which reflects nationalism from a position of weakness in a global commodity chain. Similar combinations of tariffs, labelling and safety rules are evident in the cases of catfish, crawfish, Alaska seafood and tuna. Drawing on research in gastronationalism and resource nationalism, this paper argues that these policies reframe seafood as a national asset to be protected rather than as a generic traded commodity. For fisheries science, this means that prices, trade rules and food safety standards can no longer be considered external market conditions. Including seafood nationalism in modelling and governance analysis reveals how politically driven changes in tariffs, import bans, labelling laws and safety enforcement alter incentives, redistribute benefits and harms, and complicate cooperation across fisheries and countries.