U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan on Wednesday spoke on the Senate floor about the continued import of Russian seafood into the U.S., despite there being a prohibition in place. Sen. Sullivan again urged his colleagues to pass his U.S-Russian Federation Seafood Reciprocity Act of 2023, bipartisan and bicameral legislation that would close a loophole allowing Russian harvested seafood that has been reprocessed in other countries to be imported into the U.S. at the same time American fishermen are afforded zero access to the Russian market.
Sullivan has been leading the effort for years to correct the injustice and reestablish reciprocity in the U.S.-Russian seafood trade relationship.
In his remarks, Sullivan argued that the existing prohibition is failing to meet its objective and undermines American fishermen and seafood processors, enriches Vladimir Putin and Russian oligarchs funding the brutal invasion of Ukraine, and empowers the People’s Republic of China to continue utilizing Uyghur slave labor to process some of this seafood.
Sen. Sullivan urged several U.S. based seafood companies who both sell and serve the reprocessed Russian seafood and oppose his legislation to instead buy American-sourced seafood as an input to their seafood supply chain.
“The authoritarian regimes of Putin and Xi Jinping are working together to avoid American sanctions. They take the Russian seafood caught in Russian waters, and they send it to China and have slave labor transform it, and then sell it to the United States. They are sneaking around our sanctions. That is happening right now,” said Sen. Sullivan. “American companies importing this reprocessed Russian fish—trust me, it’s not a good business model to be selling Uyghur, slave labor-produced seafood … That’s going to catch up with you. It’s not a good business model to be helping fund the Putin war machine … My answer is: Come on, be patriotic. Stand with America. Stand with American fishermen. Let’s do legislation that can … help defeat slave labor, help the environment, help strong American fishermen, help workers’ rights, and go after Russian and Chinese abuses in the seafood industry.”
Sullivan did not mince words when speaking on the nature of the Chinese fishing industry;
“Word’s getting out that the Chinese fishing industry is a disaster. They take these big fleets, they go all over the world, they ravage the high seas, they ravage fisheries wherever they go. They’re like—what’s a good analogy? I don’t know. Rats in the water. Right? They destroy the high seas fisheries. They go off the coasts of smaller countries in South America and Africa that don’t have coast guards, can’t afford anything. They’re literally like the abuser of the oceans of the world, China. And then they use slave labor.”
In August, Representative Mary Peltola addressed the same issue during her keynote address at the Kenai River Sport Fishing Association Classic Roundtable at the Soldotna Regional Sports Complex;
“The Wall Street Journal has reported an estimated $1 billion worth of Russian seafood made its way into American supermarkets in 2021. That’s a billion dollars worth of North Pacific fish that could otherwise have been caught by American fishermen bringing home money on American boats for American families. I can promise you that as long as I’m in Washington, DC, we won’t stand idly by while Russian boats with much less oversight and regulation scoop up fish and undercut our Alaskan fishermen. We introduced a bill, the Senators and I, that would ban the import of reprocessed Russian fish from China. And we’re working hard to get that through Congress.”