(The Center Square)—Charter captains, commercial fishermen and recreational fishing advocates launched a national campaign this week urging President Donald Trump to issue an executive order restricting foreign industrial fishing in U.S. waters.
The campaign calls for new protections to defend American jobs, marine ecosystems and the future of coastal communities.
The campaign, titled “Make America Fish Again,” was introduced this week at a virtual news conference with participants from Virginia, Maryland, Louisiana and other coastal states. Organizers say foreign-controlled fleets are overharvesting forage fish like menhaden, herring and mackerel. These small schooling species serve as prey for larger predators such as striped bass, tuna and whales.
They are asking President Donald Trump to take executive action to ban midwater trawling and reduction fishing, direct NOAA to set science-based catch limits and prioritize access to U.S. waters for domestic fleets.
“Only the Lord can save more fish than Donald Trump,” said Capt. Vinnie Calabro, a commercial striped bass fisherman and charter operator.
Virginia’s Central Role in the Issue
Virginia is at the center of the debate. According to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, Virginia received 75.2% of the total Atlantic menhaden catch allocation in 2023. Ocean Harvesters, a Reedville-based company, operates the menhaden operating in the Commonwealth. Ocean Harvesters has a long-term supply contract with Omega Protein, which is owned by Canada-based Cooke Inc.
U.S.-based Ocean Harvesters has defended its work in Virginia, noting that menhaden fishermen have operated continuously for over 145 years in the region.
“Ocean Harvesters vessels are crewed primarily by American fishermen, many of whom are multigenerational, holding the same jobs as their fathers and grandfathers. The fishery employs hundreds of local workers directly, and hundreds more indirectly, and has long been one of the best sources of good-paying jobs in the region,” the company said in a statement.
Menhaden are not directly consumed by people but are processed into fishmeal and oil. Sportfishing and conservation groups argue that industrial “reduction fishing” depletes the base of the marine food chain and harms both ecosystems and the fishing economy.
“Our anglers have long been concerned about large-scale reduction fishing in our fragile Chesapeake Bay,” said Steve Atkinson, chairman of the Virginia Saltwater Sportfishing Association. “We encourage President [Donald] Trump to protect these critical forage fish and our fishing economy.”
The news release cites federal data showing 2.3 million U.S. jobs and a $321 billion domestic fishing economy could be affected by overfishing. In Virginia and Maryland, striped bass harvests have dropped by more than half since the mid-2000s, according to NOAA Fisheries.
In the Chesapeake Bay, a 2023 study published in Frontiers in Marine Science reported that osprey reproduction in the bay’s main stem fell to 0.6 chicks per active nest, below the 1.15 threshold needed for sustainability. Researchers linked the decline to reduced availability of menhaden, a key forage species.
“This is more than fishing,” said Capt. Michael “Red” Frenette, a Louisiana charter guide featured in the campaign video. “I’m speaking up for thousands of communities like mine. We’ve had enough.”
The campaign has now called on Trump to issue an executive order with four main directives:
- Ban midwater trawls for forage species
- End reduction fishing of small bait fish in U.S. waters
- Direct the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration to manage forage fish for ecosystem health
- Set science-based catch targets to protect predator species
Organizers say the effort aligns with the president’s focus on economic nationalism and marine conservation.
As previously reported by The Center Square, the conflict centers on local anglers’ claims that a Canadian-owned company is dominating menhaden fishing in U.S. waters. A federal judge dismissed a 2021 lawsuit in January against Cooke Inc., Ocean Fleet Services, Ocean Harvesters and others.
The lawsuit had argued the companies misrepresented their structure to qualify for U.S. fishing permits in violation of federal ownership rules.
The judge ruled the claims didn’t meet the legal standard under the False Claims Act. But the plaintiffs appealed, arguing the companies violated the American Fisheries Act, which requires commercial fishing vessels to be U.S.-owned and controlled.
A group of law professors backed the appeal, saying in a court brief that the ruling overlooked states’ long-standing rights to protect wildlife and weakened natural resource protections.
Ocean Harvesters, which operates the vessels, said it follows all U.S. laws.
“As required by U.S. law, all menhaden fishing is conducted by U.S.-owned fishing companies, and vessels are crewed primarily by American fishermen,” the company said.
It also said that it operates in a tightly-regulated industry and denied overfishing.
“The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the interstate body that manages menhaden, has repeatedly found that the species is not overfished and that overfishing is not occurring—most recently confirming this finding in its 2022 stock assessment,” Ocean Harvesters said. “The Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission similarly found in 2024 that Gulf menhaden is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring.”
In April, Trump issued a separate executive order that expanded commercial fishing access in the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. The order opened federal waters to U.S.-flagged vessels within 50 to 200 nautical miles of the monument’s boundaries. A White House fact sheet said the move would support jobs in places like American Samoa and help counter “rampant illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing by foreign fleets.”
The Center Square contacted the White House for comment but had not received a response by the time of publication.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.