Two U.S. shrimping groups have asked the Biden administration to suspend imports of wild shrimp from Guatemala and Peru, saying the two countries have failed to comply with longstanding State Department requirements to use fishing gear that avoids sea turtle entanglements.
The organizations further argue that lax monitoring and enforcement of international sea turtle protection standards, adopted by Congress in 1989 and enforced under what’s known as the Section 609 program, have allowed a half-dozen other countries to dump illegally caught shrimp into U.S. markets at the expense of sea turtles.
The groups also said the certification program’s rules are applied inconsistently across countries and are poorly enforced. While some major shrimp exporters like India have improved compliance under closer monitoring, many other countries have either not adopted sea turtle protection rules or ignored their enforcement, they said.
“Because sea turtles are migratory animals, actions taken in the territorial waters of the United States to protect sea turtle populations are severely undermined if they are without similar protections in foreign waters,” the Texas-based Port Arthur Area Shrimper’s Association and the Florida-based Southern Shrimp Alliance, wrote to Julia Littlejohn, the acting assistant secretary of State for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs.
