A First Look at NOAA's New Plan for SIMP

Last week, NOAA released an action plan for the future of the US Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) that aims to strike a balance between three competing interests:

1) expand coverage to all seafood;
2) minimize burden to industry; and  
3) implement effective, efficient enforcement.  

This is the first big news on SIMP since the agency withdrew a proposed expansion in 2022. Since it has been a while, here’s a quick refresher on the program:

SIMP requires US importers to submit detailed harvest information to customs and produce a complete chain of custody back to the source if audited. It applies to high risk species, in total ~30% of seafood entering the US. Enforcement and compliance have been weak—per the most recent report to Congress fewer audits are conducted today than ever and over 50% of them fail.  Despite these significant challenges there has been sustained bipartisan support to make this program—which doubled in size under the last Trump Administration—work as intended and keep illegally caught seafood out of the United States.

Without further ado, let's dive into what NOAA is proposing and my initial thoughts as someone very familiar with the program.

Species Expansion

NOAA's withdrawn proposal included a relatively modest expansion of SIMP to cover handful of additional high risk species, like squid. The 2024 action plan introduces a two-tier system:

• Tier 1 is essentially the current program for high-risk species, with requirements for importing data submission and audits.
  
• Tier 2 includes all other seafood species and would require some customs reporting, but less than the species in Tier 1. Auditing was not mentioned.

Initial thoughts: This change would open the door for NOAA to make high risk species determinations (a.k.a. Tier 1 or 2) outside of the slow rulemaking process. Getting this done will be a big challenge for technical reasons I can explain in a future post. In terms of next steps, I expect NOAA will propose a very similar slate of new Tier 1 species to what we saw in 2022 along with draft criteria for how species could move between tiers.  All of this will be controversial.

Customs Reporting Changes

Easing Requirements

• NOAA plans to create exemptions for some cases, such as imports that are not for commercial sale and low dollar value imports. Officially SIMP has no exemptions today, but the fact that there is no trade mechanism for NOAA to even see imports valued under $800 means that there is a functional exclusion from enforcement for small imports already.
• Dropping some data reporting requirements from customs reporting, though NOAA didn't specify which one(s).
• Allowing foreign governments to report SIMP data in lieu of the importer. 

Adding Requirements

• Limited harvest information for imports of Tier 2 species, like country of harvest, to be reported to customs.  
  Earlier reporting to customs to allow more time for pre-import screening.
• Transshipment details for Tier 1 species (NOAA is likely referring to fish landed to another boat at sea instead of shore rather than all transshipment in the supply chain). 

Initial thoughts: Adding reporting for all seafood sounds like a major lift, but to implement increasingly complex trade policies like the Russian imports ban this seems inevitable—if not via SIMP than somewhere else. I'll be curious to see how NOAA justifies exemptions as small imports aren't less likely to contain illegal seafood. Carving out small import exemptions is a move in the opposite direction of current US trade policy trends for other high risk commodities like fashion, cotton and diamonds.  

Risk Targeting

While light on details, arguably the cornerstone of this Action Plan is NOAA’s commitment to pre-import screening, an approach that more closely mirrors the manual pre-import review process for EU catch certificates.  Screening imports at scale is crucial to the success of SIMP, but creating the tech infrastructure to do this is much easier said than done.  I should know—I have spent the last 4+ years building it from scratch! Luckily there is no need to reinvent the wheel, so if the agency is sufficiently motivated real import screening can be implemented very quickly—and without any regulatory changes to SIMP.

Initial thoughts: I expect to see a new SIMP rulemaking to begin in 2025, ideally with a more public process than we saw in 2022. Big regulatory changes like this should start with a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that adds detail and invites public feedback on how to implement these new objectives.

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