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The EU extended a US exemption from new import controls for fish after a ship full of Alaskan pollock spent days stranded off the Dutch coast because its paperwork was rejected.
The seafood industry has complained that the traceability system, which is designed to stop illegal catches entering the EU market, has left fish stuck in shipping containers since it was introduced for most countries in January.
The exemption came the day before the new system was to take effect on July 10. It has now been extended until November 30 after Washington approached the European Commission, according to people familiar with the matter.
“The Commission encourages the EU processing industry to work closely with its US suppliers of wild salmon and American lobster to ensure that, in future, they are able and willing to provide the data required for imports into the EU, in the same way as competitors in other non-EU countries,” the spokesperson said.
The issue risks inflaming transatlantic trade tensions just a week after the EU finally implemented tariff cuts as part of a deal last year to reduce Donald Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs.
The US ambassador to the EU raised the problems with the Commission after the Dutch incident in May. The people said that the vessel could not upload the necessary traceability information required by the new system until US officials intervened to allow it to dock in IJmuiden
Another vessel was stuck in port with its cargo for several days. The two boats were carrying a combined total of 16,000 tonnes of seafood, mainly pollock and flatfish.
Alaska’s powerful fishing industry said recently that the “Catch” system was “creating a trade barrier equivalent to a ban on many Alaska seafood exports to the EU”.
“Some shipments would require several thousand data entries, imposing prohibitive costs on exporters and importers alike,” it added.
The EU currently recognises a US-approved legal harvest certificate.
The US sent more than $1bn worth of wild seafood to the EU in 2025, including pollock, widely used as a replacement for endangered cod, salmon and lobster.
Canada, Norway, New Zealand, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and South Africa will also receive an exemption until November 30, according to one of the people.
About a fifth of global seafood catches are illegal or unreported, reaching between 11mn and 26mn tonnes annually, according to the EU Illegal Unreported and Unregulated Fishing Coalition of NGOs.
The EU began a crackdown on such fishing in 2010 and has temporarily banned seafood from six countries as a result.
Since Catch was introduced in January, the Commission has been forced to allow member states flexibility in implementation after fish cargoes mounted on quaysides, with warnings that shops could run out of stock.
Despite updates, there are still teething problems. Most supply chain information is still generated in paper form, and the final exporter then has to digitise it to upload it on the system.
“It was not sufficiently tested under real market conditions,” said Katarina Sipic, of Seafood Europe, which represents fish processors. “More than six months later, it remains not yet market-mature.”
“We are now moving from one extension of temporary flexibility to another, which confirms that the underlying challenges are structural and systemic rather than a series of isolated technical issues to be resolved one by one.”
An EU expert report published last month and seen by the FT said that the system still had technical difficulties.
“Operators need a data dictionary, supported message formats, sample payloads, validation rules, error codes, access roles,” the part Commission-funded report found.
“Without these, Catch will depend on manual transcription and case-by-case interpretation, while digital traceability across the supply chain will not be feasible.”
Dutch customs and the US trade representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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