Baltimore’s Phillips Foods Inc. and other U.S. companies are winding down imports of crabmeat as they brace for possible bans on foreign seafood on Jan. 1.
U.S. trade authorities announced this summer that fisheries from 46 nations had either missed a paperwork deadline or failed to meet standards to protect whales and dolphins under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act.
The law calls for a ban on imported seafood from countries that don’t meet American fishing standards to protect whales and dolphins. In August, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries published results of a yearslong investigation that concluded the world’s largest producers of crabmeat, such as Venezuela and Southeast Asian countries, had failed to meet these standards.
“You’re cutting off 89% of the source of imported crab,” said Gavin Gibbons of the National Fisheries Institute, the seafood industry trade group. “Crab cakes are coming off the menu. Period.”
i’m parsing pretty closely, but venezuela didn’t fail to meet standards, they failed to submit any application at all and were denied for that reason. the US is the biggest market for venezuelan crab meat (per some USDA report from 2022). seems like a pretty wild oversight.
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