MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. banned a ton of Russian exports, including seafood, but fish from Russia is still finding its way onto American plates. Wailin Wong from The Indicator and Nate Hegyi from New Hampshire Public Radio explain.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: If you're eating imitation crab, you are eating pollock, and while more than half of it is caught on the American side of the North Pacific, the rest is caught on the Russian side. Those pollock help drive that country's multibillion-dollar seafood industry, along with other fish, like herring, cod and pink salmon.
NATE HEGYI, BYLINE: And that industry has raised vast sums of money for the Kremlin through taxes and export duties. So seafood was one of the myriad industries the West targeted with bans back in 2022.
WONG: But actually, banning a product isn't as simple as checking for a made-in-Russia sticker at the border. Jessica Gephart is an assistant professor at the University of Washington who studies the seafood trade.
JESSICA GEPHART: It's not as if the seafood that shows up says where it was harvested automatically. Says where it's coming from, but it does not actually say who caught it.
HEGYI: Jessica recently co-authored a paper about how Russian fish entered the U.S. over the past couple of decades, and what she's talking about here is a trade law concept known as substantial transformation. Essentially, the country of origin on a label isn't necessarily where the fish was caught, it was where it was last radically transformed.
GEPHART: So if you take a whole block of frozen fish and you process it down into breaded fillets, and you import it as a bunch of breaded fish fillets that are frozen, and you're picking up that box at the market, the name of the country on that box is going to be the place that did the processing, not the country that did the harvesting.
HEGYI: And in this case, Russians are catching fish and then selling them to giant processing plants in China.
WONG: Once in China, the fish is transformed into stuff like breaded fish fingers, canned pink salmon or imitation crab. Then it's sold to the United States and other countries with a label that says it's from China. Lots of other countries export their fish to these Chinese processing plants as well, including some American companies.
GEPHART: It makes the seafood more affordable. They're low-labor costs. They're very specialized and very efficient at that processing, and so it keeps prices down for consumers.
WONG: But that also makes it too easy for Chinese processors to mix Russian fish in with fish from other countries and put them in the same bag or can.
HEGYI: In her recent study, Jessica found that before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, about 90% of the Russian seafood sold in the U.S. came through these Chinese processing plants. But looking at the most recent data she has today, she says that number didn't really budge despite Biden's initial ban. Now, the seafood industry and Alaska's congressional delegation have been pestering the federal government to tighten its bans on Russia's seafood industry, and the calls have kind of worked.
WONG: Yeah. There's since been layers of new rules and executive orders on Russian seafood, including a ban on the fish that comes through that China loophole.
HEGYI: But Jessica says it's still a pretty imperfect system, and Russia's commercial fishing industry says 2025 was a banner year for them with record revenues and a big increase in shipments to China.
WONG: So bottom line - buyer beware.
HEGYI: Nate Hegyi.
WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIOHEAD SONG, "WEIRD FISHES/ARPEGGI") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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