US shrimp fishers see Trump tariffs as a lifeline: ‘We're basically on our knees'

The Guardian

a day ago

Sandy Nguyen has strong opinions about where the best shrimp in the US is produced.
A second-generation shrimper in New Orleans, Nguyen maintains 'our [Louisiana] shrimp tastes better than Florida shrimp or Mississippi shrimp or Texas shrimp'. Her family moved to the Gulf Coast from Vietnam during the Jimmy Carter administration, and her dad, like many such immigrants to the area, worked as a fisher. The business gave Nguyen a front-row seat to one of the nation's most abundant sources of seafood.
Shrimp thrive in brackish waters, and Louisiana has the largest delta on the continent, where fresh water from the Mississippi River mixes with the Gulf of Mexico's saltwater. In part due to the sheer expanse of this delta, Louisiana shrimpers provide nearly a quarter of all shrimp caught in the US, supplying an estimated 72m lbs of shrimp in 2023 – the largest share of any state.
But things have changed drastically since the 1980s, when the Nguyen family settled in Louisiana. Demand and prices dropped during the Covid-19 pandemic. A run of devastating hurricanes – Laura, Delta, Zeta and Ida – caused over half a billion dollars in losses to the state's seafood industry since 2020. Nguyen hoped that 2022 would be a turning point, but then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the price of diesel climbed, driving up the cost to operate trawlers. As inflation appeared to be climbing everywhere else, the wholesale price of shrimp declined.
All these factors were happening alongside another massive, decades-long change: a surge in imported shrimp from Asia and South America. Talk to most shrimpers and they will say this familiar foe is driving down the price of shrimp, making it nearly impossible for US shrimpers to hang on.
So when Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs, a move that threw global markets into tumult and caused consternation among many industries, some American shrimpers instead expressed optimism.
'I know it's going to affect a lot of other industries. But for us, it's good,' said Aaron Wallace, who helps run Anchored Shrimp Company in Georgia.
The US shrimp industry pales in comparison to its counterparts in Ecuador, India, Indonesia and Vietnam. In those countries, aquaculture farms proliferate, churning out a prodigious volume of shrimp. Together, those four countries account for over 90% of shrimp imported to the US, or approximately 1.5bn lbs of shrimp in 2023. That's more than 20 times the amount of shrimp produced in Louisiana.
'Really, our battle is the farm-raised shrimp industry overseas,' Wallace added. 'We're basically on our knees [due to] what the imports do.'
'The farm-raised industry has created a market where shrimp is readily available anywhere, everywhere,' he continued. 'It's changed the way we view shrimp versus back in the day.'
Today, shrimp is the most widely consumed seafood in the US, outranking salmon, tuna and tilapia. Like chicken breast, it's a protein that people expect to buy cheaply and regularly. Unlike its crustacean cousins, lobster and crab, which are typically associated with luxurious feasts, shrimp is economical and ubiquitous. It's frequently found on the menus of chains like Popeyes to all-you-can-eat specials at Sizzler and, formerly, Red Lobster.
But shrimp's cheapness and commonplaceness have come with a cost. Consumers aren't often aware of the fact that most of the shrimp they consume is imported.
Acy Cooper, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association and a fourth-generation shrimper, said that tariffs provide an opportunity for US shrimpers to regain a foothold in the domestic seafood industry.
'We are losing our local industry,' Cooper said. That moved Cooper to vote for Trump, hoping he would 'make America great again in all sectors', including shrimping.
When Cooper was growing up in the 1970s, shrimping was a good job, one that could easily support a family. Later, in the 1980s, when Cooper was first getting his start, he could get $1 per pound of small shrimp and $4.50 per pound of large shrimp. But last year, he could barely get $1 per pound from dockside buyers for his biggest shrimp.
'Look, I quit school in the eighth grade and went to work fishing because I made more money than college graduates at the time,' Cooper said. But his own son chose to leave the industry. 'He just broke the chain in my family,' Cooper said. 'He's got three kids in his household, and he couldn't make enough to survive.'
Deborah Long, a spokesperson for the Southern Shrimp Alliance, said: 'The problem is not cheap imports. The problem is the counterproductive trade policies we have that have led to cheap imports' and that other countries benefit from practices not allowed in the US.
Long pointed to the fact that many foreign aquaculture operations are subsidized by international financial institutions backed by taxpayer dollars and employ unpaid labor or using banned antibiotics. From Long's perspective, these factors allow foreign shrimp suppliers to undercut domestic shrimp suppliers' prices.
'When you look at trade data, you will find that the 1980s were the heydays for this industry,' Long said. 'Aquaculture came around, and shrimpers were able to compete against it. And around the early 2000s, you started seeing a flood of imports. That's where allegations of dumping – selling below fair value – came in.'
However, Martin Smith, a Duke University economist who studies fisheries and seafood markets, said it's not clear that Trump's recent broad-based tariffs – those that target a wide array of goods – are the right tool to address a flood of cheap shrimp imports.
He noted that the US Department of Commerce was already working on anti-dumping and countervailing duties, which aim to counteract the impact of dumping and governmental subsidies, on the biggest importers of shrimp. Already, those duties were showing modest improvements in ex-vessel prices, the prices that shrimpers are paid at the dock.
'In principle, the system had already addressed the aspects of competition that are unfair,' Smith said. 'This additional layer of broad-based tariffs is really just saying that we are now going to make it unfair for the rest of the world.'
Smith also cautioned that any efforts to bolster the prices of shrimp could risk reducing the overall demand for shrimp, which would also adversely impact domestic shrimpers.
'There's some real long-term risk here in using tariffs to try to elevate the prices of domestic product. … It could actually just push them back into being luxury goods,' Smith said.
Still, Long, of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, applauded Trump's tariffs, which she hoped would put a dent in imports, while also acknowledging that it wouldn't be a magic bullet for all of the issues facing shrimpers.
'It is a short-term measure that is desperately needed to support these guys and get them through other seasons while we address these systemic problems,' Long said.
But Nguyen remained skeptical as to whether the tariffs would actually help the industry to which she's dedicated her whole life.
'I'm not excited about anything that Trump does,' Nguyen said. 'Even though I'm broke, I can't trust that his tariffs are going to help us because I understand the economics of the industry.'
She pointed out that tariffs could cause the price of rope, steel or even nets to go up, making the work of shrimping even more costly.
Plus, from Nguyen's point of view, it's not just cheap imports driving down the prices; it's also the fact that there are fewer processors and wholesale distributors as the industry has consolidated, leaving shrimpers with little room to negotiate at the docks.
A report on the Louisiana shrimp value chain, produced for the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, recognized this disconnect, noting that shrimpers like Nguyen are at the bottom of a value chain that is trying to compete with low global prices. Shrimpers get the short end of the stick even when consumers are paying more for the shrimp at their supermarket or on their dinner plate.
Long, of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, echoed that point.
'While the prices collapsed from 2021 to 2023, and the industry lost more than half of its value – and the values of imports plunged $1.5bn as well – consumer prices, the retail price you would pay at a grocery store, reached record highs,' Long said. 'There's a big disconnect in the market there.'
Nguyen put it more bluntly.
'It's the big dogs, the big companies, that hurt us,' she said, referring to the dockside buyers, as well as to the network of processors, distributors and retailers. 'Part of the reason our prices went down drastically is that we're making enough shrimp for all of them to get filthy rich.'
In her opinion, tariffs won't fix that problem. And it won't fix the devastation she has seen among shrimpers fighting to survive.
By 2023, she noted shrimpers she knew had 'strokes, heart attacks, overdoses, domestic violence and children not being able to go to college', Nguyen said. 'An entire way of life was stripped from us for the last three years at no fault of our own.'