ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Aquatic Foods
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1558756
Fish, funding, and food systems: A review of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recent history of grant funding in support of the seafood sector (2018-2023)
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Maine, Orono, United States
- 2School of Marine Sciences, University of Maine, Orono, Maine, United States
- 3Feeding Change Consulting, Anchorage, Alaska, United States
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Seafood is an important source of healthy animal protein, making it a valuable part of the food system in the United States. We assembled a database of 146,720 grants awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from 2018 to 2023. Our database included all grants awarded by the four USDA agencies primarily responsible for grant-making activities designed to enhance domestic food systems. We reviewed the extent to which these grants have supported the seafood sector, including wild capture fisheries and aquaculture. Of the $31.2 billion in funding awarded, only $261.7 million (n = 768) went to support projects associated with the seafood sector, representing 0.52% of the grants during the 6-year study period. Our analysis shows USDA’s recent grant portfolio has included projects related to aquatic and marine foods, but that overall funding has been limited. Using interviews with individuals involved in different dimensions of the seafood economy that have applied for USDA grants, we augment our review to offer insights into why USDA funding is important to the seafood sector, barriers that are limiting the seafood sector’s access to USDA grants, and recommendations for how to better support the seafood sector moving forward.
Keywords: Federal funding, Fisheries, food systems, Seafood, usda
Received: 10 Jan 2025; Accepted: 03 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Stoll, Advani, Dubovsky, Grinnell and Oyikeke. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Joshua S. Stoll, University of Maine, Orono, United States
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