As of January 10, 2026, the EU made its CATCH IT system mandatory for operators and authorities checking catch certificates on fishery products entering the bloc. Buyers I work with in France and other EU markets have started asking me whether every container from Vietnam now needs one. For most of what they're actually buying, the answer is no - and that distinction is worth understanding before it costs you a shipment delay.
The catch certificate rule only applies to wild-caught marine species
The EU's IUU (Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing) Regulation, and the catch certificate requirement under it, exists to trace wild-caught fish back to a licensed fishing vessel and a legal catch area. Farmed species - which is most of what Vietnam exports by value, including pangasius/basa fillet and farmed vannamei or black tiger shrimp - are aquaculture products, not wild catch. They don't move through a catch certificate at all; they're covered instead by aquaculture health certification and, where applicable, catch-free-zone attestations for the feed.
Where the catch certificate does apply: wild-caught squid, octopus, some wild shrimp and crab, and any wild-caught finfish species sourced from Vietnamese marine waters. If your purchase order is pangasius or farmed shrimp, ask your supplier for the aquaculture health certificate chain, not a catch certificate - requesting the wrong document is a common cause of pre-shipment confusion I've seen buyers run into.
What actually changed in January 2026
Before CATCH, catch certificate verification for EU-bound cargo was largely paper-based and inconsistent between member state border posts. The new system standardizes and digitizes that check for every wild-catch shipment, which means faster flagging of missing or inconsistent certificates - but it does not expand which products require one. The scope of the underlying IUU Regulation hasn't changed; the enforcement tooling has. For buyers of wild-caught species from Vietnam, this raises the practical bar: an inconsistency between the catch certificate and the shipment's declared species or weight is more likely to be caught at the border than it was a year ago.
Vietnam's separate 'yellow card' track - don't confuse the two
The European Commission has kept Vietnam under an IUU 'yellow card' warning since October 2017, tied to its fisheries management and traceability of wild-caught marine products, not to aquaculture exports. The Commission has carried out multiple on-site inspections since then, most recently flagging continued gaps in vessel monitoring, inter-agency coordination, and traceability for imported raw material used in seafood processing - even as it has acknowledged steady progress. Vietnamese authorities have responded with measures like digitizing fishing vessel logs in several coastal provinces ahead of further review.
This matters for buyer risk assessment in a specific way: the yellow card is a country-level signal about the wild-capture fishery sector, and a red card (an outright import ban, which has not been issued) would only affect wild-caught marine products - not farmed pangasius or farmed shrimp. Buyers sourcing exclusively farmed species should track the yellow card situation for reputational and market-perception reasons, but it does not change their own compliance paperwork.
What to actually ask your supplier
Before you request a catch certificate, confirm whether the product is wild-caught or farmed - the sourcing method, not the species name alone, decides the paperwork. For farmed pangasius, shrimp, or tilapia, ask for the aquaculture facility's health certificate and, if you need deeper assurance, a factory audit report covering traceability to the farm. For wild-caught squid, octopus, or marine finfish, request the catch certificate itself along with the vessel's registration and fishing license, and build in extra lead time given the tighter CATCH verification now in place.
Getting this distinction right upfront avoids the two most common delays I see: buyers asking suppliers for a catch certificate on a farmed product (which the supplier can't produce because it doesn't apply), or buyers skipping it entirely on a wild-caught line item that genuinely needs one.
Sourcing pangasius fillet from Vietnam?
I work with international buyers on sourcing, supplier evaluation, and factory inspection. If you're evaluating Vietnamese suppliers for this category, I can help you avoid the common pitfalls.
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