Month: September 2023

Born on the Bayou: Generational Shrimpers Say Industry is Facing Existential Threat

It’s Saturday morning in Bayou La Batre and the crew from SeaHarvest Shrimp is busy.

It’s Saturday morning in Bayou La Batre and the crew from SeaHarvest Shrimp is busy. Perseverance, the company’s 63-foot shrimp boat, has just returned from a three-day trip in early July, shrimping the night waters of the Bay and Gulf. Within hours of mooring they begin selling their catch to the public — straight off the boat, directly into buckets and coolers for three dollars a pound. In a matter of hours, the entire catch will be gone.  

“You find some more fresh than this, you let me know where you got ‘em,” says James Hunter. By the way he says it, he knows one cannot. A resident of nearby Irvington, he is a devoted customer, and now he is watching on as Perseverance crew member Jaylen Hall, a mid-twenty-something who grew up in the trade, shovels several pounds of brown shrimp into his ice-filled cooler. One hopes this will be enough shrimp to tide him over for the week. A former restaurant worker, he knows his way around the kitchen, especially when it comes to shrimp. Boiled, fried, prepared à la scampi, simmered in a gumbo, you name it, he can cook it.  

Fresh seafood, of course, is essential to the culture of Coastal Alabama. It’s part of our way of life. Yet this piece of our heritage is quickly slipping away. For the last two decades, the production of farmed shrimp in the Asia-Pacific region has grown at a staggering rate of 20 to 30 percent per year and the United States is one of the largest markets for this new supply. With the surge of imported shrimp our own shrimping business has come under existential threat, particularly in the past decade. In this new scenario, it is customers like James who are keeping the Hall family in the shrimping business.

SeaHarvest is a family-run business, operated by shrimper Reed Hall and his wife, Tammy. They started their retail operation back in 2020, not long after Covid dealt its first blows to so many businesses of every kind. The family bought the lot by the drawbridge in Bayou La Batre in August of that year, after most of the shrimp boats in town had shut down. They started selling directly to the public as a way to stay in business and keep the home fires burning. “Covid really blessed us in a way,” says Tammy, who runs the business side of things for SeaHarvest, “because it caused us to have to take a whole different route.”

Before that, they were selling directly to the processors and factories in town for less than the three-dollar retail price, which is no longer sustainable. Financial viability is a problem for shrimpers in Alabama and the Gulf Coast. Studies vary, but some reports put the percentage of shrimp imported into this country as high as 90 percent of the total supply. These imports drive down the price of wild-caught, domestic shrimp. 

The situation has grown so dire the city of Bayou La Batre issued a Declaration of Disaster for the town’s shrimping industry back in August. Henry Barnes, the town’s mayor, says the Seafood Capital of Alabama is in danger of becoming a ghost town due to the moribund state of the shrimping industry. He wants the federal government to put an end to the high volume of imported shrimp that are “dumped” — or sold at less than fair-market value — into the U.S. market. He’d also like the government to subsidize fuel for shrimpers. 

Eighty-five percent of the wild-caught shrimp in Alabama come out of Bayou La Batre alone, and more than 300 fishing and shrimping vessels are licensed to operate out of the Bayou. But the economics tell a different story. Barnes says shrimpers are now getting a dollar a pound for shrimp, compared to the rate of $6.50 for a pound in 1980. 

“We are not looking for a handout,” Barnes says. “We are looking for a way to make a living … this is one of the oldest professions in the world.”

There are other challenges as well. The industry took a big hit with the financial crisis of 2008 and there hasn’t been a big rebound, says Scott Bannon, director of the Alabama Marine Resources Division for the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “And all the costs associated with shrimping are going up,” he adds. “Price of fuel, price of equipment. And maintaining a boat is extremely expensive.”

Starting in June when the shrimp season opens, the Perseverance can be found every Saturday docked next to the drawbridge. By 10 a.m., the company’s band of devoted customers begin to arrive. These are folks who know good shrimp when they find them. Some of the shrimp were swimming as recently as the night before, so the only way to experience a fresher catch would be to work on the boat itself and cook them on deck. You see orders of ten pounds, twenty pounds, even thirty pounds on Saturday mornings. Customers come from as far as Atlanta and Memphis. There’s even a couple from Michigan that makes the drive down every year and hauls them back up to the north country. “I just tell them to stop half-way to drain the water and swap out fresh ice,” Tammy says.

In Alabama, there have been marketing efforts by the state to help drive up the price for domestics. “We can’t produce enough from the wild harvest to meet the demand,” says Chris Blankenship, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “What we’ve tried to with the ten percent of shrimp that are wild-caught is to create a premium brand for that [in Alabama], so people will play a little more for domestic quality shrimp.”

History of the Bayou

Shrimping is the heart of Bayou La Batre, the Seafood Capital of Alabama. Not far from Dauphin Island, the town boasts a long and storied history that begins with its founding in 1786 when the French-born Joseph Bouzage was awarded a Spanish land grant in what is now south Mobile County. In the early twentieth-century the town began to make its name as a fishing village, not long after the hurricane of 1906 devastated the area and killed an estimated 150 people in south Mobile County alone. Almost ninety years later, Bayou La Batre would be imprinted upon the mind of global pop culture when Hollywood immortalized the richness of Bayou La Batre’s coastal heritage. As the hometown of Forrest Gump’s bosom war buddy, Bubba, whose dream of owning a shrimping boat inspired the title character to start a shrimping operation, it became the place where Forrest made his first fortune, drawing Lieutenant Dan along the way to the place where he would make his peace with God.

With a population of about 2,200, the Bayou remains a center for shipbuilding and is still home to a number of seafood processors and canneries (an industry also under threat with the current level of import “dumping”). For decades it has known a large Southeast Asian population. In the late 1970s, refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia settled in Bayou La Batre — as well as other parts of the Gulf Coast — to work in the shrimping and fishing industries. These immigrants had fled the ravages of a war-torn homeland, and the deltas and bays of the Gulf harkened back to the estuarine waters of the old country. Here, they could make a living and raise a family. Some worked on boats, while others worked jobs in the canneries, picking crab meat and keeping the production floor running. Even today, Bayou La Batre remains something of a cultural polyglot. Roughly a quarter of the town’s population is Southeast Asian, though many have gotten out of the seafood industry in the last decade or so.

 Continue reading at MobileBaykeeper.org.

The Boat People

For Americans watching the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975 — the day that officially marked the end of the Vietnam War — the chaotic scenes from our Embassy rooftop were the closing images of a long and tragic chapter in our history. For many of our South Vietnamese allies, along with scores of others from war-torn Indochina, it was the beginning of another chapter in their American story. 

The story of their flight from Vietnam, and the daring in their undertaking, reads as though it were taken from the pages of one of the great 17th-or 18th- century immigration sagas. On any craft they could find, most of them wooden, many of them hardly sea-worthy, these refugees left by the thousands, risking everything in search of a better life. The ones who fled would come to be known the world over as “the boat people.”

It is estimated that from 1975 to 1995, some 800,000 refugees left Vietnam alone. At sea, they faced storms, disease, and even pirates. The dangers were so great and so common that their exodus became an international crisis. The United Nations reports that somewhere between 200,000 to 400,000 boat people died at sea.   

Many of those who survived settled along the Gulf Coast. The commonality of coastal life with its fishing and shrimping and related industries made it a familiar haven. Since the time of the refugee crisis, Vietnamese-Americans — along with other immigrants from Laos and Cambodia — have been a fixture in the seafood and shrimping industries in Bayou La Batre. It was here they worked on the boats and in the seafood processing plants, playing a critical role in the town’s culture. 

For most of the boat people in the U.S., the challenges of assimilation have been prolonged and acute. It is from this environment that the non-profit Boat People SOS was born.  

Continue reading at MobileBaykeeper.org.

Lotus Eater

I’d long heard about the American Lotus that blooms each summer in the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta. How it blankets huge swaths of water with its yellowed beauty. Until recently, I regret to say, I had never seen these mythical flowers up close and in the wild. Nor was I aware they grew so plentifully in the lower reaches of the Delta, just a short kayak trip from the Causeway. My impression had always been that you had to venture by boat into the upper reaches of America’s Amazon to see such huge patches in all their glory. 

So when my colleague Valerie Longa, the education director at Mobile Baykeeper, told the staff the flowers were still blooming in early August (it’s rare for them to be strutting their stuff so late in the season) and a large patch could be seen just a short paddle from Meaher State Park, I had to take a look for myself. 

So I kayaked one Saturday morning to Ducker Bay, a small inlet circumscribed by wetlands just west of the Blakeley River, with the hope of finding them still in bloom. You can find this little bay by launching at Meaher and hanging a right before reaching the Blakeley and then navigating through a narrow pass curtained on both sides by enormous cordgrass. 

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