Lawmakers support new fees on Louisiana seafood dealers who import foreign catch

State lawmakers advanced separate bills Tuesday to address the dominance of cheap foreign seafood in Louisiana. One would require seafood dealers to pay higher fees for importing foreign catch into the state, and another would require wholesalers and retailers to obtain a new seafood importer license.

House Bill 748, sponsored by Rep. Jessica Domangue, R-Houma, would raise the state’s imported seafood safety fee from a flat $100 per year to a 0.1% assessment on the company’s gross revenue. 

The proposal marks the freshman lawmaker’s first bill, which Domangue, the daughter of a commercial fisherman, called “very special” for its ability to protect the domestic seafood industry. It cleared the House Committee on Natural Resources and Environment with unanimous support and will head to the House floor for consideration.

Imported seafood has become so ubiquitous in Louisiana and across the nation that it has decimated the once-thriving domestic fishing industry. The low cost and ample availability of foreign catch has put negative pressure on local product prices, making it near impossible for those in the Louisiana commercial fishing industry to stay above water profitwise.

It also poses significant public health concerns from lack of resources available to officials to inspect and test foreign catch for harmful contaminants. Because federal inspectors test only a tiny fraction of seafood imports, Louisiana officials have tried to supplement the effort with their own screening. 

Under current law, the Louisiana Department of Health collects a $100 annual fee from processors and distributors who import seafood from foreign countries. The fees partially fund the health department’s screening program. 

With 58 permitted wholesale distributors of imported seafood across the state, the fees provide only a small amount each year for testing. 

Opposition toward the measure came from Sal Piazza, owner of Piazza Seafood World, which describes itself as the “#1 importer of Spanish crawfish.”

Piazza said he believes Louisiana seafood poses more of a health risk than imported catch. 

“In the last five years, there has not been one single imported product that caused anyone to be ill or hospitalized, but domestic product has caused it many times,” Piazza said. He cited the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as his source for that claim, but the Illuminator was unable to independently verify it. Available FDA data on foodborne illness outbreak investigations do not readily identify whether the food is domestic or foreign sourced.

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Piazza said Domangue’s bill would only harm local processors because his big customers, such as U.S. Foods and Cisco, would simply buy seafood fom out-of-state processors to avoid the fee. 

“This bill would cause us a financial burden,” Piazza said.

Domangue told the committee her bill does not create anything new, but simply increases an existing fee seafood dealers have been paying for more than two decades. 

“We already have this law on the books,” she said. “What we’re asking today is that we just increase the fees — the fees that were implemented 25 years ago.” 

The committee advanced a separate but similar proposal that would create seafood importer licenses required for wholesalers and retailers that import shrimp, crawfish or crab. Restaurants are not considered retail dealers.  

House Bill 676, sponsored by Rep. Tim Kerner Sr., R-Lafitte, would charge between $500 and $100,000 for an annual license depending on the amount of product imported. 

Kerner said the fees are capped at 10 cents per pound and would result in a cost burden of only about 5 cents for an average sized seafood platter. 

Like Domangue’s proposal, Kerner’s bill directs the fees into a fund to pay for state-level inspections and testing of imported seafood. 

Kerner’s bill also heads next to the House floor for consideration. 

Both measures derive from the work of two legislative panels, the Imported Seafood Safety Task Force and the Louisiana Seafood Safety Task Force, which held meetings last year to investigate and find solutions to the foreign seafood issue. 

The committee also advanced two resolutions that would urge Congress to impose quotas or tariffs on import seafood and expand FDA testing on foreign catch. However, those measures are unlikely to prompt any federal legislation because of the partisan deadlock on Capitol Hill.