SOS for shrimpers, processors alike

For now the talk is limited, a few conversations there on the VHF radios, or here in a series of Facebook posts.

But the talk is very real and should be taken seriously.

In the old days, when there were few cell phones, no Facebook and only the VHF, word did not travel as quickly from boat to boat and fishing family to fishing family.

Now the ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship communication possibilities are endless, and that can be both and good and a bad thing.

The dominant word in the posts and the radio chatter today is “strike,” and it nearly happened Tuesday. It might still happen.

It has to do with the price.

Over the past two years fishermen have been getting the best prices ever for their shrimp, the result of several market factors not the least of which is an ailment in the shrimp ponds of Asia that strikes the little darlings early in life, resulting in far fewer imports here and a far greater demand for what fishermen catch in the wild.

For a rare moment in time the fishermen and the processors, within whose doors most of the shrimp caught here winds up, were happy with themselves and each other.

The relationships between buyer and seller can be quite tense, a phenomenon rooted not just in dollars but in emotions. There are sons of processers who will tell you how as kids they were jumped in the schoolyards by sons of fishermen, and sons of fishermen who will tell you of sins against their fathers by the processors.

The fishermen and the processors generally have differing worldviews.

Some processors have been guilty of paternalism and plantation mentally, harboring a belief that the shrimp is already theirs while swimming free and that it is the fisherman’s task to bring it to them.

Some fishermen have been guilty of short-sightedness, by not seeing the world beyond the dock in which the processors must function, and harboring unnecessary bitterness and presumptions that they are cheated, when the processors in many cases are merely responding to an increasingly brutal global market.

And so we have the current situation, where fishermen in Jefferson, Plaquemines and in smaller numbers around Lafourche and Terrebonne are entertaining the potential of tying up their boats if the dock price drops by another 30 cents.

To be sure, 30 cents per pound is a lot of money when you are talking this kind of volume, even with fuel prices slacking.

The problem with the strike idea is that fishermen – who are self-employed – would essentially be striking against themselves.

The processors, in dropping prices, are responding to market conditions. Simply put, if I am a processor selling shrimp for $3 per pound on the open market, and if shrimp from Myanmar or Thailand is going for $2.50, the big buyers are going to buy cheaper.

Our local fishermen and processors don’t supply even one quarter of the shrimp consumed in the U.S., let alone the whole world.

So a war between them is like two parts of a dog’s tail fighting because they don’t like the direction the dog is taking them.

But there is a key difference. In that analogy the dog might feel the pain of the tail striking out at itself. The great dog that is the global market will feel nothing and continue on its way without missing a step.

At the moment of writing this I have learned that shrimp prices dropped by 35 cents at local docks almost across the board, depending on size, and that means within a few days a strike might begin.

That fishermen are driven to this point is understandable. They deal with weather and equipment breakdowns, ever-increasing regulations and an economy that weighs on their families even without drops in price.

That processors are in a pickle and must drop prices is understandable as well. Some have too much shrimp in storage bought at high prices, which now may be sold for far less, if at all. They have banks that warily eye their dealings, ready at a moment’s notice to cut off credit lines if they fear too much risk.

It is my personal hope that processors and fishermen will find some way to communicate openly – and respectfully – with each other as these tensions rise.

Both segments of the industry depend on each other for survival. Both together face common competition. Both are capsized together in a sea of cheap, imported shrimp. And if they don’t together find a way to stay afloat, it’s all over but the drowning.