Seafood Source
US Congress includes update to South Pacific Tuna Treaty, ban on military purchases of foreign seafood in annual defense funding bill
By Nathan Strout
U.S. lawmakers are set to vote on a compromise version of the annual military funding bill – which includes major seafood provisions – as soon as 10 December.
Congress has been late in passing the annual appropriations bills that funds the federal government, missing the 1 October deadline to have fiscal year 2026 spending in place and sending the government into a partial shutdown for over a month. Lawmakers have since passed a temporary spending bill to reopen the government in November and keep it open into January, allowing work to resume on the appropriations bills – including the annual defense spending bill (NDAA).
With substantial differences remaining between the House- and Senate-passed versions of the bill, select lawmakers entered conference to draft a compromise version that can pass both bodies.
On 8 December, the heads of the House and Senate Armed Services committees released the final texts.
“We’re pleased to announce that the House and Senate Armed Services committees have reached a bipartisan, bicameral agreement on the FY26 NDAA that supports our servicemembers and strengthens our national defense. We’ve worked together to deliver the most significant acquisition reforms in a generation – cutting red tape, accelerating decision-making, and improving our ability to get modern capabilities into the hands of our troops on time and on budget,” the legislators said in a joint statement.
Though some of the seafood provisions survived, others were left on the cutting room floor.
Most notably, the Fighting Foreign Illegal Seafood Harvest (FISH) Act did not survive the final cut.
The FISH Act would create a blacklist of vessels involved in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, banning them from U.S. waters. U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) has been pushing the legislation for years and, in 2025, was able to attach it as an amendment to the fiscal year 2025 defense appropriations bill. However, the provision was ultimately dropped during conference negotiations and was not passed into law. Though Sullivan attempted the same maneuver this year, again attaching the FISH Act to the annual military spending bill, the provision was again dropped from the final version of the legislation.
One seafood provision that survived the chopping block, however, was restrictions on the military purchasing foreign seafood.
The Berry Act requires the federal government to purchase American-made products in general, but it does provide for exceptions for select products and those the government deems do not have a reasonable U.S.-produced alternative.
In September, U.S. Representative Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) introduced an amendment to the House military spending bill eliminating any exceptions to the government’s Buy American directive for seafood, fish, or shellfish purchases.
“For too long, foreign competitors have undercut American workers, threatened our economy, and exploited loopholes in federal law. Our amendment ends it,” Mace said at the time. “If the Pentagon is buying seafood, it will come from American waters, caught by American hands, not from our adversaries.”
It’s not clear how big an impact Mace’s language would have on the government’s seafood purchases; the Berry Amendment already requires all seafood products to be sourced from U.S.-flagged vessels or harvested from U.S. waters, and all processing must take place in the U.S. or on a U.S.-flagged vessel.
However, a recent audit of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) found that the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps were not including required “Buy American” language in their seafood procurement contracts. Still, the audit also found that the vast majority of military contracts “effectively implemented federal laws prohibiting the procurement of seafood from foreign sources” and only found one example of a purchase of foreign seafood. In that case, a prime vendor sourced its seafood from Chile. Once the vendor was notified, they removed the Chilean product and replaced it with a U.S. product.
The Senate passed a similar provision banning the military from buying seafood originated or processed in China for commissaries or dining halls. According to Roll Call, the provision was first added by U.S. Senator Rick Scott (R-Florida), U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), and U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Mississippi). An identical provision was included in the fiscal year 2025 Senate NDAA but, like the FISH Act, was dropped from the final version.
The final version of the 2026 NDAA ultimately scrapped the language of Mace’s Berry Amendment tweak in favor of the Senate ban on the military procuring China-origin seafood but expands the prohibition to include seafood products from Iran, Russia, and North Korea, as well.
The final draft of the military spending bill also included language from the South Pacific Tuna Treaty Act, legislation introduced earlier this year to update U.S. law to reflect changes made to the treaty in 2016.
The treaty – which was first signed in 1987 – allows American purse-seine vessels to harvest tuna from the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of 16 Pacific Island states. The treaty has been updated multiple times – most recently in 2016.
However, Congress has not updated federal law to reflect those most recent changes. While American fishers have been allowed to continue fishing in those EEZs under a memorandum of understanding, lawmakers claim that those fishers need the law to be updated in order to fully take advantage of the 2016 negotiations.
“The amendments enacted in 2016 provided much-needed updates, including clearer access terms and more flexible mechanisms for engagement with Pacific Island countries. But nearly a decade later, these improvements are still not reflected in U.S. law,” U.S. Representative Ed Case (D-Hawaii) said in May. “This legal disconnect has left the American fleet, including vessels operating out of Hawaii, in a state of regulatory limbo. Operators are forced to navigate conflicting rules between what the treaty allows and what our domestic regulations enforce. It's a situation that adds unnecessary risk, uncertainty, and cost to an industry that is already facing tight margins and fierce international competition.”
The House passed a version of the South Pacific Tuna Treaty Act in 2024, but the bill was not approved by the Senate before the end of the legislative session. The House again passed the bill in May 2025, but it has not been taken up by the Senate to date.
The Senate did include the language in the Coast Guard authorization bill it passed in March, but that legislation has still not been passed into law.
By adding the language to the final version of the annual military spending bill, which is expected to pass both bodies this week, U.S. law will finally reflect the most recent version of the treaty – nearly 10 years after negotiations took place.