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...Here's a story I wrote on it in 2005:
Bayou La Batre is still a hallmark. The 200-year-old fishing village has survived hurricanes aplenty from its perch near land’s end in southern Alabama, yet its toughest challenge to date comes not off the Gulf of Mexico but from the Pacific.
The glut of cheap, Asian, farm-raised shrimp into the American market in the last five years has gutted the value of the seafood. The result for Bayou La Batre is likely to be disastrous.
The town, an hour south of Mobile, has drawn its life from the water since founded by Joseph Bosarge in 1786 as the result of a Spanish land grant. The hamlet emerged from the banks of the Bayou where the waterway still cuts through the center of it all. A fleet of shrimp boats still bob on the docks, the forest of idle masts and mooring a testimony to current events.
Close to 400 boats operate out of the Bayou with more than 1200 fishermen of all types calling it home. Though oysters, crabs and fish are also harvested, shrimp have historically comprised 90% of the seafood intake.
As expected, about 85% of gross income in the Bayou is marine-related. Boat manufacturing and maintenance, marine supply, electronics, net shops all exist in town. Seafood processing is also a big industry with about 80% of the seafood processed arriving from other states and nations.
All told, close to $400 million are generated annually by Alabama’s seafood-related industry, the vast majority of it through the Bayou.
But, times are changing. The fleets are shrinking and not just in Alabama. Texas’ fleet, for example, has shriveled up since peaking at nearly 5000 in the 1980s.
Ironically, it’s certainly not due to lack of demand. Americans are consuming shrimp at record levels. However, less than 15% of the shrimp eaten in the United States are wild shrimp. Conversely, shrimp from domestic endeavors alone are woefully insufficient to provide for American demand.
The U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that over half of the imported shrimp come from aquaculture efforts in southern Asia. These farms have spread throughout southeastern Asia and into South America, helping meet increasing worldwide pleas for a sea delicacy that was once almost prohibitively expensive.
Close to four years ago, the European Union, Japan and Canada banned shrimp from their respective markets due to what were deemed worrisome levels of chloramphenicol in random specimens. The chemical is a potent, broad-based antibiotic linked with cases of aplastic anemia.
Raising shrimp in the close confines of farm ponds can be risky. Disease can spread rapidly and destroy a crop. Taking advantage of the lax industrial regulations of developing regions, farmers will load shrimp down with any available cocktail of antibiotics which will keep the shrimp healthy enough to be harvested. Other prevalent practices fill the shrimp with food and additives designed to make them grow quickly and stay plump for quick sell.
The EU and its compatriots felt this was an unsatisfactory risk. When they closed the doors, suddenly there was a glut of shrimp with nowhere to go. The Asians looked to America.
Over a billion pounds of shrimp were dumped onto the U.S. market at rock bottom prices. The value of all shrimp, imported and domestic, farm-raised and wild, dropped accordingly.
The resulting havoc has flowed across the Gulf of Mexico and up into its bayous and backwaters.
Bayou La Batre shrimper Johnny Cieutat can tell you. He’s been in the shrimping business for close to 30 years and has seen it go through changes but none as bad as this. “This ain’t shrimping,” he explained. “This ain’t how it should be.”
Cieutat, whose grandparents immigrated from France, has seen better days. At one time he had 5 boats but has culled back. “It’s just hard to find good help,” he explained, “and it’s almost not worth going out now.”
He also talks about climbing diesel prices and plummeting shrimp values. “You know, you come back in after spending money on 30 thousand gallons of fuel and supplies and you got all these other costs and then you’ve got to hand one of these guys (his crew) a check for only 800 dollars. For a month’s work? If you’ve got a house and a car and a family, you can’t live on that.”
Joe Potter echoed Cieutat’s sentiments. Starting in 1967, Potter once had as many as 8 boats. Now he’s “down to a half,” as he puts it. He shares a vessel with his son and considers himself retired. But he’s still active.
Potter serves on the board of the Organized Seafood Association of Alabama, a coalition formed as a direct response to the Asian shrimp dumping. They work to contact legislators and the public about their plight and what can be done.
“We’ve got some legislation passed,” Potter said. “We got Amendment 4 passed last November. It gave us the right to start a check-off program where we collect money through the state agriculture department.”
Potter knows the answer lies with knowledge. “What we got to do is inform the public through these marketing programs,” he said. “Now we had a poll done, about two years ago. It showed that the people of Alabama, 96% of people wanted to know the country of origin of the shrimp that they bought. They even said they would pay more per plate in a restaurant if they knew that was Alabama wild shrimp.” Potter explains that the coalition has a logo in the works that they would like to see put into use to identify Alabama wild shrimp.
“We’ve got to develop a niche market for our wild shrimp. You know a wild shrimp, you get your omega3 fatty acids and all. You can’t get that from a pond-raised shrimp. They’ve been fed grain.
“And wild shrimp just taste better. It’s what they feed on. It’s like your fish from Alaska, your salmon and all. That wild salmon is good for you but the pond-raised are grain-fed and aren’t that good.”
Potter’s thoughts are congruent to those in positions of greater influence. “I think one good thing that’s come out of the difficulties of the last few years,” said U.S. Congressman Jo Bonner, “has been the realization that they (shrimpers) are going to be a lot more powerful and respected voice if they will speak together.”
Bonner represents the Bayou on Capitol Hill and sees marketing as one solution. “I think the efforts to market the shrimp as fresh Gulf wild shrimp have helped. If you think back just a few years ago, no one would have gone to the grocery store just to buy a Vidalia onion, but Vidalia is proof positive if you brand yourself and market yourself in some way, people will pay even more money for an onion that they believe is sweeter and tastes better.”
The new coalition has won other battles, too. The Southern Shrimp Alliance petitioned the federal government on Dec. 31, 2003, accusing foreign competition of dumping cheap shrimp on the American market. The shrimpers succeeded.
“Clearly our government has already spoken out,” Bonner said. “The Department of Commerce and International Trade Commission have spoken out about the dumping issue. I was grateful the ITC actually ruled in favor of American shrimpers back on January 6. It was a vindication for the claims we’ve been making.”
The resulting penalties will even things out a bit. “They (Asian shrimpers) don’t play by the same rules that we play by,” Bonner explained. “They don’t have the same wage laws we have. They don’t have the same OSHA safety regulations we have. They don’t have the same environmental regulations we have. They don’t even have food safety regulations that we have from the FDA. So, when you go into a grocery store or into a restaurant and buy shrimp from Thailand or Indonesia or China or some of these other countries, you don’t know what has been dumped into those ponds to artificially make those shrimp grow. And I think you can tell a difference in the quality of the shrimp.
“I don’t like tariffs. I think one tariff leads to another tariff and before long it has a domino effect. But I do think you’ve got to send a strong message. You’re not going to come into our country and not play the rules we have in our country and then bring your product in and put our shrimpers or our farmers out of business. If they were playing by the same rules and regulations we have, it would be a totally different matter. But they’re not.”
Other efforts to equalize things are more controversial. The Gulf of Mexico Fisheries Management Council has proposed a moratorium on the issuance of further shrimping licenses in order to balance out the market. Though not in effect yet, it looks as if it will be enacted within a few months. Anyone not issued a license prior to Dec. 6, 2003 would be ineligible under this new proposition. The hope is that the moratorium will keep the industry feasible for those with the most investiture.
Less profitable inshore shrimping would be unaffected by the freeze.
The response from many in the fishing community has been unenthusiastic. Bonner sums their feelings up in one word: “Frustrated.”
“First it was the Federal government stepping in with turtle excluder devices and other environmental regulations. Now, they feel like they’re getting hit again from the other side. I can understand it.”
“I think that most people can’t really truly comprehend what it’s like to live such a rough life out on the open waters, with all the challenges they face. Most people, we’re consumers. We go to the restaurant. We want a fried shrimp basket and we also want to make sure that we pay as little for it as we can. It’s very, very difficult unless you’ve walked in their shoes to really appreciate the challenges and frustrations and fears that they have.”
Some claim domestic shrimpers are being punished yet again by the moratorium, while imports continue to flood the market. Family traditions are being interrupted. They feel the answer lies in slowing the flood from Vietnam, Thailand, India and China or raising the prices of imports.
A new requirement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture goes into effect this month. It requires shrimp in grocery stores to display their country of origin and whether they are wild or farmed. However, it is only applicable to “unprocessed” shrimp, which excludes any shrimp that are breaded, cooked or canned.
Restaurants are exempt from the disclosure regulation.
When the shrimpers’ coalition initially formed, an alter ego sprang from the corporate shadows in the form of the Shrimp Task Force. The S.T.F. has actively fought any action or tariff against shrimp importation and has frustrated domestic shrimpers.
Task force members include the Sysco Corporation, America’s largest food distributor and a company whose annual seafood sales exceed $1 billion. Also holding membership is Slade Gorton & Co., with over $300 million in annual sales.
A similar litany of corporate interests are also the chief profiteers of the importation glut.
There’s Red Chamber, a private seafood supplier whose operations are so massive they have been known to fill immediate orders for up to 2 million pounds of shrimp.
Thailand’s largest processor, the C.P. Group, has now developed its own U.S. importing company and is rumored to have considerable pull in Washington.
Companies like Mazzetta, Rich-Sea-Pak and Contessa Food Products who each earn a quarter of a billion dollars annually.
Darden Restaurant Group, owner of the Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Bahama Breeze and Smokey Bones franchises, buys over $500 million of seafood directly from Asia, India and Latin America.
ConAgra Foods of Tampa, Fla., is the nation’s largest seafood processor with annual sales of $1.2 billion.
All of these have played their part in the overall drama with some actively forming groups to fight regulation of various sorts. They are no strangers to the fray.
And neither is Bonner. He promises that all he and fellow legislators need is a heads-up from the folks on the front line. “When the anti-dumping cases came first to the Dept of Commerce and then to the ITC, we got strong support from the congressmen from Mississippi and Texas and Florida and Louisiana and outward. It’s something that affects more than just us down here.
“If we don’t do something, we may well wake up one day without the ability to buy shrimp grown and harvested in this country. I don’t want to go down that path.”
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