The EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) took effect on August 1, 2020 - which makes today its sixth anniversary. Six years in, France sits among the EU's top five destinations for Vietnamese seafood, alongside Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, according to VASEP's market breakdowns. But the EU as a bloc has been one of Vietnam's weaker-growth markets through 2026, even as China, Hong Kong and the US posted stronger gains in the same period. For a buyer in France, that gap between "the tariff deal is working" and "the market isn't accelerating" is worth understanding, because the two facts aren't in conflict - they're describing two different problems.
The tariff story already played out as promised
EVFTA did what trade agreements are supposed to do. Most raw shrimp lines (fresh, frozen, chilled) dropped from a 12-20% base tariff to 0% the moment the agreement took effect. Frozen pangasius fillet fell from 5.5% to 0% over a three-year phase-in that has long since completed. Half of all EU seafood tariff lines were eliminated on day one; the rest phased out over three, five or seven years. For a French importer buying pangasius fillet or frozen shrimp from Vietnam today, the duty question is largely settled - it's 0% on the product lines that matter most to volume buyers, and has been for years. If a supplier or broker is still pricing EVFTA duty into your landed-cost model as anything other than zero, that's worth questioning directly.
The actual constraint: the IUU yellow card, not the tariff schedule
What's held the EU market back isn't import duty - it's the European Commission's "yellow card" warning on illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, first issued in 2017 and still in force as of mid-2026. It applies to Vietnam's wild-caught seafood exports and layers additional catch-documentation and traceability requirements on top of standard EU import rules. Vietnam has been pushing hard to get it lifted by the end of 2026, and the numbers behind that push are real: vessel arrival and departure logging on the national e-monitoring system rose sharply through 2025, and catch-origin certificate issuance grew several times over year-on-year. A fifth EC inspection mission visited Vietnam in March 2026 to assess progress, with the outcome of that visit a deciding factor in whether the warning is lifted, held, or escalated to a red card (which would mean an outright EU import ban on the affected catch categories).
The practical point for a buyer: this bottleneck sits on top of the tariff deal, not instead of it, and it applies specifically to wild-caught product - farmed pangasius and farmed shrimp aren't implicated in the same way, since IUU concerns are about wild-capture fisheries management. If your sourcing mix in France leans toward aquaculture species, the yellow card is a smaller factor in your risk assessment than it would be for a wild-caught product line.
Why this matters more in France specifically
French retail and foodservice buyers tend to run tighter sustainability and traceability screening than some other EU markets, partly driven by domestic retailer commitments and partly by consumer-facing labeling expectations. That means the yellow-card overhang shows up faster in a French buyer's supplier qualification process than it might in a market with looser downstream scrutiny - documentation gaps that would pass unnoticed elsewhere get flagged here. It's not a formal regulatory difference; it's a market-behavior one, and it's the kind of thing that shows up as a stalled approval rather than a rejected shipment.
What I'd tell a buyer sourcing into France right now
Stop treating the EVFTA tariff line as a live negotiating variable - it's settled, and for most product categories it's zero. Redirect that diligence toward catch-documentation chain-of-custody instead, especially for anything wild-caught: ask your supplier or agent to show you their eCDT (electronic catch documentation and traceability) paperwork trail before you commit volume, not after a shipment gets held at the French border. And if you're building a new France-facing program this year, farmed species carry meaningfully less yellow-card exposure than wild-caught right now - a genuinely useful filter while the EC's end-2026 decision is still pending.
Sourcing pangasius fillet from Vietnam?
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