If you live in Maine and think of shrimp as those sweet little Pandalus borealis sold from trucks by the side of the road during winter, think again. Even though the fishery served for generations as a winter mainstay for many state harvesters, Maine’s little shrimp are scarcely a blip on the radar of U.S. shrimp consumption. Depending on where you read the figures, imported larger varieties of farmed shrimp account for 85 or 95 percent of the tons of shrimp consumed in the U.S.
Despite America’s love for shrimp, the Maine industry has been shrinking even while the stocks, once diminished, rebound. While the resource this winter is huge and the shrimp are high quality and a good size, fishermen can’t find enough markets for their product, forcing prices down. Meanwhile, fishermen who fish for America’s other traditional shrimp, the larger species of saltwater shrimp found in the Gulf of Mexico, have launched a marketing effort to woo U.S. consumers back to their wild-caught product and away from the imported, farmed varieties.
“We’re not the only ones processing Maine shrimp,” said John Norton, president of Cozy Harbor Seafood in Portland. “But we are the biggest. We’re buying the most shrimp this year.” During the past several years, when regulators determined Gulf of Maine shrimp stocks couldn’t sustain a normal fishing season, boats were often limited to fishing for so few days, it was scarcely worth changing over their gear for the brief fishery. A few times, scientists recommended not opening the fishery at all, but regulators allowed a brief season. Processors stopped processing because they couldn’t get enough product to supply their markets. Even Cozy Harbor stopped for a while.
Following a trade mission to Europe, where former buyers told him they missed buying Maine shrimp, Norton bought new equipment and restarted his fresh and frozen Maine shrimp business two seasons ago.”Regulators gutted this industry by not letting boats fish, so we couldn’t supply our markets,” Norton explained. “There was no need for the Draconian measures they put in place. As a result, our product left the marketplace. The market didn’t just sit there and say `We’ll wait until you come back.'”
While Maine was virtually out of the market, production of Northern shrimp in Canada exploded. “Newfoundland began producing 120 million pounds a year,” said Norton. Imports of farm-raised large freshwater shrimp also exploded.”If you consider the Maine industry has been put to sleep since 2000,it’s like Rip Van Winkle. We woke up and the world went on without us. We have to rebuild from scratch,” Norton said.
Cozy Harbor works with the same vessels regularly and stocks are so plentiful this year, these vessels easily catch everything the processor needs. Other Maine processors have a similar setup, said Norton, meaning vessels not working closely with a processor have limited markets. In 1995 and 1996, Maine shrimpers were earning $1.00 lb. for their catch. This year, they’re getting less than half that.
Alvin Dennison, 58, of Owls Head has lowered his price for fresh, whole shrimp from $1.50 a lb. to $1.00 lb., reflecting the low price fishermen are getting. Dennison, a veteran of the Vietnam war, parks his patriotically painted truck beside Route 1 on the Thomaston cement flats. He’s been selling shrimp and other seafood there for 12 years, nearly every day, usually 12 hours a day.
He’s watched the catch fluctuate and the prices drop in recent years.”Last year was the worst year I ever had, for everything,” said Dennison. While he bemoans the loss of shrimp-fishing jobs and other jobs in Maine, he says of his own, “You can’t get a better job, working for yourself.”
If the Maine shrimp industry has suffered, the other traditional U.S. shrimp fishery in the Gulf of Mexico, has also been hit with a number of catastrophes. The tremendous influx of inexpensive imported farmed shrimp in the past decade drove their prices down and put many fishermen and processors out of business. Three years ago they formed the Southern Shrimp Alliance and brought a trade action against six countries that supply 70 percent of the imported shrimp. After an investigation, the International Trade Commission agreed with the SSA’s claim they had been hurt by imports selling at artificially low prices. The ITC levied tariffs ranging from 2.35 percent to 112 percent against shrimp exporters from Brazil, China, Ecuador, India, Thailand and Vietnam.
Well over 500 million metric tons of shrimp was imported in 2003 and 2004. Overall preliminary totals for 2005 showed imports had dropped somewhat, particularly imports from some of the six countries, especially China, hit with the highest tariffs.If the six countries don’t win their appeals to the trade action, a U.S. law colloquially referred to as the “Byrd Amendment” will pay all the money collected through the tariffs to the affected domestic industry, in this case, the southern shrimpers, who stand to collect hundreds of millions of dollars.
However, there’s a catch. Gulf shrimpers and processors who signed onto the SSA need to meet one requirement in order to collect: They must stay in business. Hurricane Katrina left hundreds of Gulf shrimp vessels stranded in marshes, far from their ports, and many processing facilities were destroyed. In many cases the ports no longer have the infrastructure to accommodate the vessels and stalled recovery efforts are not helping.
“Here in Bayou LaBatre alone, we still have 25 commercial shrimp boats sitting up in the marshes,” said Joseph “Joey” Rodriguez, president of the SSA, and a Bayou La Batre, Alabama, shrimper who operates two vessels. “They’ll only be eligible to collect Byrd funds if they’re back in the water and producing shrimp.
“When we started our action three years ago, we were not filing to collect Byrd money, but to try to get a fair playing field,” said Rodriguez. “Those countries were dumping shrimp and breaking our trade laws. The crazy thing is that an injured industry has to spend money to enforce U.S. trade laws.”
Some of the SSA’s financial problems mirror those faced by Maine shrimpers. “In the past three years, we lost 45 percent of the domestic shrimp industry to bankruptcy and foreclosures,” Rodriguez added. “We have an abundance of product now, but no premium prices. We’re working on 30-year-old prices and fuel’s jumped to $2 a gallon.”
Whether the beleaguered Gulf shrimp producers ever collect their Byrd money, they have other plans to rescue their industry. Two years ago, they helped launch a marketing campaign run by another organization called “Wild American Shrimp.” That group is marketing the shrimp products of the eight Gulf and South Atlantic states aggressively and with positive results so far. Celebrity chef Emeril, of New Orleans, famous for his TV show trademark line urging the spicing up of recipes, “Kick it up a notch!,” now offers his own line of Emeril’s Wild American Shrimp. Last November, retail giant Wal-Mart, announced that 900 of its stores’ full-service areas would carry frozen Wild American Shrimp produced by a U.S. company.
Even Wally Stevens, president of Boston’s Slade Gorton Co., approves of this marketing campaign. Stevens heads up the American Seafood Distributors Association, the U.S. organization that wants to repeal the tariffs. Most of the ASDA members sell tons of imported shrimp. Bonding requirements and escrow accounts now tie up millions of dollars for importing companies, forcing all smaller companies and many large ones out of the importing business. Consequently, many exporting nations are setting up import companies in the U.S.
“The best thing that’s happened in all of this is that wild shrimp producers have realized they have to market their product. The market hasn’t changed. The supply side is more than equal to the demand,” said Stevens, whose company stopped importing shrimp and now buys from other importers. “We spend all our money fighting trade barriers, not creating demand. Wild-caught U.S. shrimp is a great product that can be marketed distinctly.”