Tag Archives: Gulf shrimpers
Shrimpers face pricing issues
“I’ve been in the business with my parents when they were alive, straight out of high school, which is about thirty something years ago. I have never seen the price of shrimp this low,” said Jose Cuevas Jr., owner of Los Tortugos Seafood Market. Cuevas has a fleet consisting of eleven shrimp boat. He says all of his boats are now sitting idle because it’s not cost effective to go fish. He said it costs 30 to 40 thousand dollars just to fuel up one boat to go out. Other shrimpers are having the same issues with fuel costs keeping them docked. “Usually for us, around this time of year, fuel prices are a dollar fifty. Right now, they’re at close to three dollars, so double,” said Alberto Ochoa, owner of Ochoa Trawlers. Video, more, >>click to read<< 15:02
Galveston shrimpers being run out of business due to low prices, overseas imports
Captain Jerome Kunz
Texas Gulf shrimpers are going out of business during what many are calling the worst period in the history of the industry. “You’ll see numerous boats up and down this dock and most of them are just set here,” Nikki Johnson-Kunz said as she stood along Pier 19 in Galveston. Pier 19 was once a bustling hub for Galveston’s shrimping fleet — from the same spot a few years ago, one could watch dozens of shrimp boats running back and forth to the Gulf and then to the seafood markets along the docks to sell their catch. Johnson-Kunz married into a Galveston family that’s been fishing the waters for shrimp for more than a century. They said business has never been as bad as it is now. “Our prices that we get paid per pound are under a dollar,” she said. “It’s sickening.” Video, >>click to read<< 10:52
Shrimp and Grit: Fighting to save the Fort Myers Beach shrimping fleet after Ian’s devastation
The Perseverance sunk. The Penny V was crushed. The Pleiades cracked in half. Aces & Eights had five holes. The Babe took a beating. The Capt. Ryan was boxed in. The Kayden Nicole tipped. Boats were scattered along the San Carlos Island waterfront in clusters. Six boats were flung into bushes, sea grape trees and dead mangroves not far from Trico Shrimp Company, the other major shrimp player on the waterfront. Ten floated maybe a quarter mile west, up into an RV park and a boatyard. Most of these boats were old before Ian arrived. They had been built to last one decade but stretched for five, held together with the glue of ingenuity, by owners and mechanics unwilling to concede to those who called it a dying industry. Right after Ian, just one boat was fit for sea. It was the F/V Malolo, the namesake of the boat Anna’s great-grandfather had first brought to Fort Myers. Photos, >click to read< 21:30
Gulf shrimpers brace for offshore wind
Trae Cooper risks punctures to the fiberglass hull of his grandfather’s boat every time he pulls out into the gray waters at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Trawling for shrimp that swim along Louisiana’s muddy coast means coexisting with the forgotten pipelines, corroded steel, gnawed plastic and bits of iron that the oil industry left behind as it marched gradually through these marshes and out to sea. And that’s why Cooper, 39, and many shrimpers in the region say they know enough to worry as a new industry crops up in the Gulf of Mexico: offshore wind. >click to read< 07:40
It’s time to kill the Gulf dead zone, as Gulf Shrimpers fight for their livelihoods
Anyone who has followed this issue over the three decades or so it has been studied knows progress has been slow. They also know Louisiana, though it bears the lion’s share of environmental and economic harm,,, >click to read< Gulf shrimpers fight for their livelihoods in a fertilizer-fueled dead zone – Dean Blanchard Seafood, headquartered on the barrier island of Grand Isle in the Mississippi River Delta, is one of the largest shrimp suppliers in the United States. >click to read< 11:32
Gulf shrimpers contend with falling prices, tainted imports
Worrying about bills and plummeting shrimp prices, Dwayne Harrison stopped to apply for a mowing job one morning recently before dropping his nets in the Houston Ship Channel. The 65-cents-a-pound he was getting last week for small, head-on wild shrimp is one-third the price of a year ago and less than his catch brought in 1998, the year he bought his 50-foot vessel, Angel Lady. Harrison, 51, is among Gulf shrimpers who say they’re leaving the business or are barely afloat, and many blame imports, which make up more than 90 percent of the . Last year, imports rose by 143 million pounds and are up another 2 percent in 2015. Read the rest here 10:22
Gulf Shrimpers Taking a Beating Thanks to Cheap Imported Shrimp.
Previously crippled by disease, imported shrimp from countries such as Indonesia have made a major comeback and have flooded the U.S. market, experts say. In summary, shrimp wholesale is remarkably cheap right now and that means bad business for the local guys. “The industry is in outrage right now,” Thomas Hymel, specialist for the LSU AgCenter, said Tuesday. Last year, much of the foreign, farm-raised shrimp product was decimated by a disease called early mortality syndrome, or EMS. Less shrimp in the market meant a bump in prices. Read the rest here 07:54
Gulf Shrimpers are still hoping for the best
The scientists can look at the conditions up to a point and base their predictions on the best information they have. But things can change, and shrimpers know they often do. [email protected]
