The Louisiana seafood industry is struggling right now. Last month, Hurricane Ida tore through some of the most fertile spots for fishermen to catch fish, shrimp, and oysters. It’s an industry that brings in nearly $2.5 billion to Louisiana. With fishermen trying to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, the bounty they bring in from the Gulf of Mexico won’t be as big. Newell spoke with Harlon Pearce, Owner of Harlon Seafood Louisiana, Ewell Smith, of the Gulf Seafood Foundation, and Tommy Cvitanovich, Owner of Drago’s Seafood Restaurant about the future of the Louisiana seafood industry.
“When we think about the industry, the fishermen and so forth, how much of the industry from vessel impairment have you been able to quantify?” Newell asked.
“We're working on those numbers right now,” Pearce said. “As far as infrastructure damage or revenue damages, that's probably two different questions... I'll go back to Hurricane Katrina, that number was $583 billion. I believe that this number we're going to come up with today is going to be well over half a billion dollars. You just don't have fishing boat damage. You're going to have environmental degradation. Things have changed dramatically in the estuary,that's going to be a long-term problem. The big situation is who's going to want to come back. We already have a problem with fleets in which nobody wants to get into the business anymore, or this over-regulatory regime within which we live, or the inability to do what they need to do. The long term effect of this is we're going to have less and less fishermen. We're going to have less and less production.”
“Some restaurants and seafood stores are not able to get the seafood they carried before Ida and are waiting for their suppliers to get back up and running. How long can you expect that to really occur?” Newell asked.
“We had a problem before the hurricane,“ Pearce said. “The COVID event affected prices and not only affected domestic production, it affected the imported product. For instance, the jumbo lump crab meat import was at $18. It went to $38 overnight and right now,you can't find it. We like to find a few pounds of the domestic product to satisfy the customer base that we have… but there's escalating prices across the board and it's not just seafood, and it's just really affecting us. We need to get back to where we get some stable volume, moderate prices to survive and until we do that, it's gonna be tough.”
“Let's talk about the shrimp industry for a second,” Newell said. A lot of shrimp docks are impaired or destroyed,” Newell said. “There are five shrimp plants that are up and running right now?”
“Right, the bulk of the shrimp are coming from Texas and Louisiana… There’s some boats coming in now, but the inability to process the shrimp is going to be a problem in the future… like you said a lot of the other areas are gone and a lot of them aren’t coming back. Shrimp are still one of our strongest fisheries and our most volume fishery...Our fight right now is trying to bring together a group of people to go to Washington to find some funding to try and get infrastructure and revenue problems solved. ” Pearce said.
“We have to keep this story alive,” Ewell Smith said. “We're doing that through www.gulfseafoodnews.com... we've got our reporters on that website doing stories to keep this going, so we can tell the stories as they evolve, because people will forget about this pretty quickly… and getting this message out is vital to all these efforts that we do to address any damages that you just heard about. The reporters and coalition we put together understand the urgency to keep the culture alive.”
“What's going on with the oyster industry as a result of Ida?” Newell asked.
“The Board of Health has opened up the waters of the east bank of the Mississippi River from the mouth of the river, all the way to the Louisiana Mississippi line the last ten days,” Cvitanovich said. “Now we're getting beautiful Louisiana oysters back into the pipeline, but oyster fishermen can't just go and start fishing oysters again. They’re just like you and me when you get home after a storm. You've got to go out, rake your yard, pick up all the leaves and branches. That mud, leaves, and those branches all fall on top of the oyster beds. For the oysters to survive they need to filter water... if they're covered with leaves, debris, and mud, the fishermen have to come and literally use their dredges to rake the bottom of their oyster beds, and get all of that trash off of the top so the oysters can start breathing and filtering water.
“Ida tore through some of the most fertile oyster beds in America,” Newell pointed. “When do we anticipate the possibility of those beds being reopened?”
“That's on a case by case basis… if I had to make a guess that it would probably be at a minimum another month or so, or longer,” Cvitanovich said.
“Prime oyster harvest season is right now. Where do we see prices going?” Newell asked.
“Oysters by the gallon before the storm were $50 for a five pound gallon. Those things are now $78 and you can't get them sometimes. Inflation is everywhere right now because of the COVID and then you slap on top of that the increase because of Ida. The restaurant industry in South Louisiana is struggling, but when we're out of this, we're going to be stronger people because of it,” Cvitanovich said.
Hear the entire interview in the audio clip below.
