he US Court of Appeals for the
federal circuit has reversed a decision by the Court of International Trade
that had allowed the US to ban shrimp imports from countries that did not use
Turtle Excluder Devices when fishing for export to other than the US. The US
court now has ruled that the US can import shrimp from those countries as long
as the vessels producing the shrimp for US import used the TEDS to do so. This
ruling allows those countries to fish without TEDS as long as those products
are not sent to the US.
American shrimpers have to use TEDS in their fishing activities. The new
ruling can be interpreted two ways; as Dick Gutting, President of the National
Fisheries Institute, says, now our shrimpers are on even ground (in
competition) with those from other countries who produce shrimp for the US
market while using TEDS. Yet, more wild-caught shrimp can now be sold in the
US, lowering the price that American shrimpers now receive, so this benefits
the distributor, not the producer part of US shrimp business.
The US State Department made the decision to relax these conservation
restrictions, and apparently, asked the Appeals Court to take on the case. It
is reasonable to ask why this matter involved the State Department, when the
Commerce Department is the usual agency that attends to these matters. It would
appear that a trade-off was made with those other shrimping nations, for some
reason that was not related to conservation. The issue has been politicized on
the one hand, and has not helped our own producers, while US fish distributors
have applauded this outcome.
Once again, the US Government is seen to be hypocritical in the matter of
international conservation policy development. 
