This is not a story about the relief President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs are anticipated to give America’s shrimpers.
Yes, shrimpers were cheering Trump’s decision to slap double-digit rates on dozens of countries earlier this week in what they hail as a move that will level prices of domestic shrimp squeezed out of a market flooded by imports.
Supporter Spotlight
Shortly after the White House on Wednesday afternoon abruptly paused the tariffs that had gone into effect some 12 hours earlier, and lowering them to 10% on goods for 90 days – minus those from China – the Southern Shrimp Alliance released a statement reiterating its support for tariffs.
“It is encouraging that the Trump Administration’s tariffs have prompted countries to show a new willingness to address trade policies disadvantaging American producers,” Southern Shrimp Alliance Executive Director John Williams stated. “We want to compete in a market where competitors cannot use intolerable practices like forced labor and banned antibiotics to undercut us. For shrimpers, tariffs respond to an urgent need to offset unfair trade.”
And while shrimpers say that will be the case, that’s not where they want their message to end.
Their story goes beyond the call for fair trade. It’s one that entails America’s overseas subsidies of foreign shrimp production and buyer beware warnings that domestic shrimpers say should be, but are not, conveyed to consumers of America’s favorite seafood.
“Ultimately, we’ve gotten sold out by our government because they’ve backed or funded these aquaculture programs in Southeast Asia and South American for more than 30 years,” said Craig Reaves, a member of the Southern Shrimp Alliance’s board of directors and owner of CJ Seafood and Sea Eagle Seafood and Good Eats in Beaufort, South Carolina. “For 40, 50 years, they’ve been developing aquaculture overseas and whether it’s through the World Bank or whether it’s direct grants or subsidies from the United States, we created the monster that is the imported shrimp and imported seafood industry.”
Over the past decade, the U.S. Treasury has supported more than 70 shrimp and aquaculture development projects through international financial institutions, according to the Southern Shrimp Alliance. Billions in funding has flowed largely to India and Ecuador, the group said.
Supporter Spotlight
As a result, imports have overwhelmed inventories of shrimp in the U.S., driving market prices for domestic-caught shrimp to record lows.
Shrimpers who have survived have done so because they’ve largely turned to local markets to move their product, many selling directly from the dock to customers eager for fresh-caught shrimp.
“Without that we certainly would not be able to shrimp anymore fulltime as a career,” said Monica Smith. “If we did not sell directly to the consumers and build that clientele over the last, you know, 20 years then we wouldn’t be able to do it.”
Smith runs Miss Gina’s Seafood in Beaufort, the waters of which her father-in-law, now in his 90s, and husband, Thomas, have shrimped for decades.
There was a time when the father-son pair sold the shrimp they caught to fish houses, a standard practice through the 1980s and 1990s.
But that began to change some time around the mid-2000s, Smith said. That’s when shrimpers saw what she describes as a “drastic increase” in imported shrimp inundate the market, driving down the price for domestic shrimp and crowding out space at processing facilities.
In 2021, roughly 2 billion pounds of imported shrimp products valuing $8 billion flowed into the United States, according to the Southern Shrimp Alliance.
An estimated 94% of the volume of shrimp consumed in America comes from foreign nations, according to the U.S. International Trade Commission, or USITC.
Southern Shrimp Alliance says that more than 90% of that came in last year from India, Ecuador, Indonesia, and Vietnam, all of which impose tariff and tax rates of between 13% and 45% on shrimp caught and farmed in the U.S.
In October 2023, the American Shrimp Processors Association, or ASPA, filed anti-dumping petitions on frozen warmwater shrimp from Ecuador and Indonesia. Dumping is the import of goods below normal value.
The group also filed countervailing duty petitions, or import taxes created to offset an exporting country’s subsidies, on frozen warmwater shrimp from Ecuador, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
A year later, in November 2024, the USITC affirmed that the U.S. shrimp industry was materially injured from frozen warmwater shrimp imports from Indonesia and that the Department of Commerce determined shrimp from Ecuador, India and Vietnam were being sold at less than fair value.
The Commerce Department issued countervailing duty orders on frozen warmwater shrimp imports from those three countries and an antidumping duty order on imports from Indonesia.
Last month, congressional representatives, including North Carolina Republican Rep. Greg Murphy, reintroduced bipartisan legislation that would halt federal funds from going to international financial institutions to finance foreign shrimp farms.
A house bill known as the Save Our Shrimpers Act, was referred March 11 to the House Committee on Financial Services.
During the past decade, the U.S. Treasury has agreed to support more than 70 shrimp and aquaculture development projects through international financial institutions, according to Southern Shrimp Alliance.
“And those imports come in here, they sell them at a lower price because they’re using cheap labor, forced labor, sometimes child labor, and they’re full of antibiotics,” said Nancy Edens, president of B.F. Millis & Sons Seafood in Sneads Ferry. “There is a big difference in what we catch here in the ocean, Pamlico Sound, New River, than what you would get in a restaurant that serves imported shrimp.”
The Department of Labor added the largest supplier of shrimp to the United States, India, to its 2024 List of Goods Produced with Child and Forced Labor.
The Ocean Outlaw Project, as well as an Associated Press investigative report, highlighted those labor practices. The Ocean Outlaw Project also found that shrimp directed to the U.S. market were contaminated with antibiotics the American government has banned for use in shrimp.
“I think we’re going to always have imported seafood so I would like to see our government stop subsidizing these other countries and let them stand, rise, or fall on their own merit,” Reaves said. “We just want a fair shot. Tariffs, to me, it’s an immediate help, but it’s not a long-term fix because you can negotiate. I think you have to seize the moment while everybody’s talking about the things that’s even more important, which is raising awareness of how bad the imported seafood is and how the government knows that it’s bad.”
