Posted on 09/18/2005 6:20:05 AM PDT by mcg2000
For Coast shrimpers, end of a livelihood: A heritage, Southern culture may be lost with the battering from Katrina
By Matt Apuzzo/ September 16, 2005
BILOXI -- Hanh Luong has no home and no cash. The only thing he has left, and his only hope for the future, is the Santa Maria, a battered 98-foot fishing boat he worked years to buy.
But two weeks after Hurricane Katrina, his boat remains tethered to what's left of Biloxi's piers. The polluted Gulf of Mexico is off-limits to shrimping, and all the major processing plants between Alabama and Louisiana have been pulverized by Hurricane Katrina.
"I need to fish," the 52-year-old Vietnamese immigrant says. "I need shrimp."
These are desperate times for Southern shrimpers. Much of the fleet is on land, in the trees or splintered by the storm.
"Boats are at the bottom of the water. People are dead inside," says Dung Nguyen.
Many of his fellow shrimpers stayed aboard their boats during the storm in a futile attempt to save them, he says.
Those who survived, like Luong and Nguyen, can do little but wait.
"This year, no more work. No jobs," said Nguyen, a shrimper for the past 10 years. "They say shrimp is poison."
Katrina could not have come at a worse time for the $2.5 billion American shrimping industry, which has been buffeted for years by high gas prices and cheap imports from Asia.
The once-dominant Gulf Coast shrimping business now supplies about 10 percent of the shrimp sold in the U.S., with Louisiana and Texas responsible for the biggest hauls. Most of the remainder is imported.
Texas shrimpers escaped unscathed, but Hurricane Katrina threatens to wipe out many other Gulf Coast shrimpers.
"It's the straw that broke the camel's back for some of them," said Alabama shrimper Joey Rodriguez, who learned the trade on his grandfather's boat and whose elderly father still fixes nets in the family shop. "If you're somebody who was already down to the last thread of survival, just trying to keep the bills paid, this will leave you flat out."
For shrimpers like Rodriguez, the millions of dollars being lost each day along the Gulf Coast is only part of the tragedy. Shrimping is part of Southern culture, a trade that is passed on and binds generations and families. For Nguyen and the many other Vietnamese immigrants, many now subsisting on donated food, shrimping was their American dream.
The son of a fisherman, Luong came to Biloxi from Vietnam in 1980 and found a job shucking oysters.
"I get some money, I buy a little boat and go to work," he says. "I get some more money, I got a bigger boat."
Before the hurricane, he loaded thousands of pounds of shrimp into the freezer. Now he borrows $200 a day in gas to keep the generator running, hoping a processing plant will open soon.
Other shrimpers just gave up, giving away thousands of pounds of raw shrimp or leaving it to rot in the sun.
Luong can't afford to give up. He borrowed nearly $700,000 to buy the Santa Maria. Though he's paid off the loan, insurance won't buy him a new home and the shrimping industry is so bad now, he couldn't get $200,000 for his boat.
"You've got families displaced out of heritages and livelihoods," Rodriguez said. "It's the only thing they've known. How each individual story plays out, God only knows."
Rodriguez works in Bayou La Batre, Ala., the setting for the shrimping scenes in the movie "Forrest Gump."
The situation is even worse in Mississippi and Louisiana, where processing plants were reduced to scrap metal and valuable equipment was thrown into the water.
"In the past 10 years, we've lost half the commercial fleet," said Rex Caffey, an agriculture professor at Louisiana State University's Sea Grant program. "My guess is the next half will be, well, this could be the death knell."
Some in the industry refuse to give in.
Wild American Shrimp, the trade group that is trying to cast Gulf shrimp as a niche commodity like Maine lobster, called an emergency meeting Monday to discuss the hurricane.
Also this week, American shrimpers are scheduled to testify in Washington before the International Trade Commission, which is considering removing tariffs on shrimp imported from India and Thailand.
Foreign shrimpers say they need the tariffs removed to help them recover from the tsunami that devastated southeast Asia.
"We hope they'll take into consideration our situation," said Rodriguez, the president of the Southern Shrimp Alliance. "We've had our own tsunami."
American shrimpers say they can't compete with inexpensive foreign shrimp, especially with gas prices so high. A shrimp boat can burn about 100 gallons of fuel an hour and boats typically run around the clock.
"The hurricane just added misery on top of misery," said Tommy Schultz, 73, a retired fisherman from Pascagoula, Miss. "At the end of town, where the seafood families live, it's completely gone. There ain't five structures down there."
Like many other retirees, Schultz has found it hard to walk away from the job he held since he was a boy.
"I can wake up in the morning and know when a weather change is coming. I can smell that water and the air and tell you what the water is like, where the best place is to shrimp that day," he said.
Before the storm, Schultz used to join his friends on the docks in the evening, swapping stories and jokes as people fixed their boats. There's nobody left on the docks and Schultz said some won't return. Others -- the ones with insurance -- will return to fish out their days, he said. But after Katrina, some will likely decide not to pass the trade on to their children.
"It's the end of the line," he said.
Sux. Get ready for expensive shrimp.
More fear mongering. The Bikini Atoll islands are now considered a tropical paradise. The big oil spills were reported this way too, but little is heard about the environmental damage because the evidence is that nature has terrific capacities for regeneration. IMHO, in a few years, these fisheries will rebound as well. As for the industry side of things, nothing could speak more eloquently than this quote from one of the shrimpers:
"The son of a fisherman, Luong came to Biloxi from Vietnam in 1980 and found a job shucking oysters. "I get some money, I buy a little boat and go to work," he says. "I get some more money, I got a bigger boat."
I wonder if this shrimp expert from Tennessee knows if Texas Shrimpers will be able to fish Louisiana waters?
Fried Coconut Shrimp! Hummmmm.
This is fear mongering, a good way to drive the prices sky high.
And they don't even have to go out into the Gulf, all they needed was a get into the Intercoastal Canal and go either east or west. Fuel is less expensive than a new boat.
Of course! These guys could have run up the Mississippi as well. Storms always hook to the east when they come ashore. Insure the sucker and leave it is what we always did with our boats.
I guess the point of the story was that the Gulf is now too polluted to fish. I can't comment on that one way or the other but if this guy has a 98 foot boat he should be able to go fish in the Atlantic if he wanted to.
Southern culture won't be lost. Once the runoff subsides and the waters settle down, hard working people like Hanh Long will pick themselves up and go back at it.
I'm not so certain ... in the short term at least.
The sewage of oil, gas and disease will be drained from Lake Pontatrain (sp?) back into the Gulf. That will cause substantial damage to that eco-system. Essentially the same thing happened in Bilxoi/Gulfport with the tide dragging everything back to sea with it.
It can recover ... it'll just take a year or so.
I've heard what others confirm: Shrimp recover very quickly - more quickly than oysters and lobsters, and western Louisiana/Texas Gulf Coast is relatively unaffected. Story is shameless alarmism without research - typical MSM.
You got that right. Out here on the west coast, the pink shrimp industry is hurting because of Canadian imports.
Another aspect of this, with the spike in fuel prices, which were rising anyway, is that with the depressed price of shrimp, right now the 80' foot boat is tied up till something breaks, either the price of shrimp goes up, or the price of fuel goes down a bit. Otherwise, it actually costs to fish...
As for a boat switching fisheries, I don't know how it works in the gulf, but out here the boat has specific permits, which here can cost a 100K give or take, depending on the fishery. A shrimper can't just switch to bottom fishing or salmon trolling. As for taking off and going to the Atlantic, again the price of fuel may prohibit that. They may also not have a market there even if they could afford the fuel. You can have a boatload of fish, but if you can't sell it, then it ain't any good.
I am glad you know so much about gulf shrimping, being from Minnesota and all. I started shrimping in 1954 in Mobile bay. I know nothing about what evfer the f--- you do in Minn.As I am from Bayou La Batre and I do know a small amount about shrimping.
This, along with the fact that the Govt in march said that if you do not have a boat registered in the gulf there is a ten year moritorium on registration. This problem has been coming on for about 10 or so yrs. The enviro nut job tree hugging pri--- with the help of the Fish and Wildlife service, using sea turtles, set out to destroy the gulf shrimping ind. And it is working.
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