For fifty years the Marine Mammal Protection Act has carried a clause almost nobody enforced: seafood imported into the United States must come from fisheries that protect whales and dolphins about as well as American fisheries do. Last year, NOAA Fisheries finally enforced it. Now the agency is asking the public how to make the job easier — and being candid that the current version may be beyond it.
In a 29 July Federal Register post, NOAA Fisheries said the import provisions work, but at a cost it did not foresee.
"NMFS' implementation experience indicates that the MMPA import provisions framework is an important tool that can be used to encourage harvesting nations to implement more effective measures to reduce marine mammal bycatch but that administering the program at the scale required by the current regulations is resource-intensive and operationally complex," the agency wrote, adding that "completing the first full round of comparability findings proved to be significantly more complex and time-intensive than [NOAA Fisheries] anticipated when the final rule was promulgated."
The mechanism dates to a 2016 rule. NOAA must issue a "comparability finding" for every foreign fishery exporting to the US — more than 2,500 of them — confirming it meets American standards on marine mammal bycatch. Fisheries denied a finding lose the US market. The rule came with a five-year grace period, which the agency extended three times before a final deadline of 31 December 2025.
The first full slate landed in August 2025. NOAA issued full findings for 89 nations and partial findings for fisheries in 34 more, while denying 240 fisheries across 46 nations, National Fisherman reported. Twelve countries were denied outright: Benin, Grenada, Guinea, Haiti, Iran, Namibia, New Caledonia, Russia, Saint Lucia, The Gambia, Togo and Venezuela. Four of them — Benin, Haiti, Iran and Venezuela — never submitted an application.
That is roughly the outcome conservation groups spent a decade in court demanding. They sued in 2024 to stop further delays.
"The MMPA sets a strong international standard for preventing bycatch, but the US has been ignoring it and abandoning the iconic ocean animals it's supposed to protect for more than half a century," Center for Biological Diversity Oceans Legal Director Kristen Monsell said at the time. "Whales and dolphins being caught in fishing nets around the world can't afford any more delays."
They are back in court now, arguing the opposite problem — that NOAA cleared countries it should not have. On 21 May, CBD, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Animal Welfare Institute filed suit in the US Court of International Trade challenging findings issued to Argentina, Ecuador, India, Norway, Taiwan, Tunisia, the United Kingdom and Vanuatu, calling them "based on incorrect assumptions, flawed and inadequate evidence, and other logical and factual errors." Among the examples cited: Vanuatu tuna vessels not using hooks designed to cut false killer whale bycatch, and franciscana dolphin caught in Argentine commercial gear.
"This litigation should result in a seafood import ban for the eight nations, and the governments will have to crack down on deadly bycatch to get back into the lucrative US seafood market," said CBD International Program Director Sarah Uhlemann.
Earthjustice Senior Attorney Danika Desai framed it as a consumer question. "Thanks to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the United States has worked to save countless numbers of whales, dolphins, and other animals from dying in fishing gear," Desai said. "But many other governments do not have similar protections and fisheries drown and injure marine mammals at alarming rates. Seafood from those dirty fisheries will wind up on our plates unless the US government follows the law and bans it."
NRDC's Director of Global Biodiversity Conservation, Zak Smith, argued the rule protects domestic fishermen as much as marine mammals. "The US seafood industry is a world leader in this, but our government continues to let foreign fisheries peddle their whale- and dolphin-killing fish into the United States as long as these governments say they're 'trying,'" Smith said. "That is not good enough."
The seafood trade sees a different failure. A coalition of US processors, distributors and industry associations sued NOAA in the same court in October 2025, arguing the agency spent ten years assessing fisheries in private and then gave American businesses four months to restructure their supply chains.
"After a decade of assessing fisheries, without stakeholder input, NOAA has given affected members of the seafood community only four months to come into compliance or face complete shutdown," said Gavin Gibbons, Chief Strategy Officer at the National Fisheries Institute. "We are talking about US processing and distribution businesses working with imported raw materials that cannot be sustainably harvested at this volume in our own waters."
The industry coalition is careful to say it does not oppose the MMPA itself. Its argument is that a blunt import ban moves the fish rather than saves the mammal.
"Banning these products is very likely to do more harm than good," Gibbons said. "Shutting off commerce with fisheries gives up leverage and actually encourages selling to countries with little or no marine mammal protections. Fears about unintended consequences are very real."
NOAA's own account of the difficulty lends the industry's process complaint some weight, if not its conclusion. The agency described evaluating detailed conditions for every fishery across "vastly different legal systems, institutional capacities, monitoring programs, bycatch reduction strategies, and data availability," reviewing enormous volumes of documentation and going back to governments repeatedly to resolve inconsistencies. The first review round took more than three years.
The hardest part, by NOAA's telling, is the central term. "Defining 'US standards' and what may be considered to be 'comparable in effectiveness' for a multitude of fisheries under a range of systems of governance presents an immense analytical hurdle," the agency said.
It has asked for comment on five areas: clarifying what "US standards" means, accounting for differences in national legal systems and capacity, improving administrative efficiency, applying the rule consistently across exporting nations, and keeping a level playing field for fisheries selling into the US market. Comments close on 28 September.
