United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) headquarters building in Washington, DC.
Photo: Adobe Stock.
In a joint statement released last week, the North American Marine Alliance (NAMA) and the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC), which it joined in 2008, expressed concern about the direction the newly created U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of Seafood could take.
While welcoming the inclusion of fishing communities, they warned that unless there is significant participation from small and medium-scale producers, the new office could prioritize the corporate interests of large fishing or aquaculture companies.
As a basis for its objection to the USDA Office of Seafood, NAMA cited the experience of its colleagues at the NFFC, who, representing family farmers across the United States, "have felt firsthand the repeated shortcomings of USDA's policies and programs."
In its view, while the U.S. Department of Agriculture claims to support family farmers, often its policies have ended up helping financially powerful multinational corporations and agribusinesses.
"If left unchecked, a similar dynamic could unfold where big-moneyed factory fishing or aquaculture interests could reroute valuable resources for their own ends, instead of providing support for struggling fishing families working to build sustainable livelihoods in their respective communities," the statement reads.
Although, as we have just seen, the factory fishing sector is also mentioned in their statement, the North American Marine Alliance and the National Family Farm Coalition acknowledge that what particularly concerns them is the role of corporations, including agribusinesses, interested in replicating the land-based industrial agriculture model by establishing factory fish farms on land and at sea.
"Referring to fishermen as 'farmers of the sea' without addressing issues of scale, ownership, and ecological responsibility raises concerns that seafood systems are being framed through a large-scale, production-focused agribusiness lens," NAMA and NFFC claim.
"Based on prior talks between NOAA and USDA, we worry that the new office could just serve as an interagency alignment tool to bolster feedlot-style industrial fish farming. This practice degrades marine ecosystems and hurts wild fisheries, and by extension commercial fishing families," the statement continues.
It's worth noting that the North American Marine Alliance is one of the more than 420 organizations that last February submitted a joint letter to the U.S. Congress urging to reject the Marine Aquaculture Research for America Act of 2025 (MARA Act of 2025, S. 2586 | H.R. 5746), which, according to its proponents, would allow the NOAA Office of Aquaculture to authorize offshore aquaculture, facilitate the approval process for offshore aquaculture operations, and create Centers of Excellence in Aquaculture, thereby promoting the growth of the sector.
In contrast, the letter's signatories warned that, under what they consider to be "the misleading label of 'research'," the bill would open the door, for the first time, to large-scale industrial fish farms in U.S. federal ocean waters. In their view, the bill would authorize long-term leases in public waters, allow private companies to build large operations designed to grow and sell farmed fish in high volumes, and lock in ongoing harms that coastal communities would be left to absorb.
Opened in mid-April, the U.S.'s new Office of Seafood was announced by USDA as the place where the US fishermen will be recognized as a "key" part of the United States food supply, with the ultimate goal of working alongside the U.S. Department of Commerce and other federal partners to revitalize the national seafood industry, in addition to implement Executive Order 14276 by President Trump—'Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness'. Released in April 2025, the order supports the "America first" idea also for seafood products.
The North American Marine Alliance and the National Family Farm Coalition believe that, with proper leadership and full participation from the country's fishing communities, the USDA Office of Seafood has the potential to create and manage programs that serve as a lifeline for fishing communities, helping them cope with future economic shocks and environmental fluctuations.
However, they also believe that if USDA follows its pattern of favouring agribusiness over family farming communities, there is no guarantee that the agency will help fishing communities achieve economic parity. Therefore, NAMA and NFFC urged the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ensure an honest participatory process to develop the mission, policies, and programs of the Office of Seafood, genuinely involving fishing communities.
Members and allies of NAMA and NFFC said they are willing to work with the USDA to help guide the office "toward a positive path forward," one that, they said, honors its hard work in providing nutritious food to communities across the country.
"We believe that is the only way this new office's purpose and objectives will meet the true needs of America's fishermen and farmers and the communities they feed," the North American Marine Alliance and the National Family Farm Coalition stated.