Halley E. Froehlich, a professor of fisheries and aquaculture at UC Santa Barbara, and her colleagues find that the Trump administration’s May 2020 executive order on promoting American seafood competitiveness and economic growth “ends up being a complicated and opaque ask,” given the complexity of the seafood industry and the headwinds it has been experiencing of late.

However, it is possible to map out a sustainable means for growing the seafood industry, according to the researchers. Looking through the lens of the executive order, they outlined several guiding principles to bridge the current state of U.S. seafood and the desired outcomes of the federal directive.