SC shrimp season fully opened but fewer local shrimpers are on the waters. Here’s why
Two words and one action can help South Carolina’s storied and struggling shrimping industry: Eat local.
For some, it’s a culinary click-phrase that goes unpracticed. For others, it’s a habitual routine at farmers markets, grocery stores and restaurants. But for Cameron Reaves, who captains a shrimp boat with Beaufort-based Sea Eagle Market, his family’s livelihood depends on people eating locally.
While shrimpers have been able to harvest from eight smaller provisional areas in the state’s outer waters since April 19, commercial shrimp trawling opened in all of South Carolina legal waters Tuesday, which means fresh shrimp will be more readily available at docks and markets along the state’s coast.
Now, shrimpers are harvesting browns and early-season large white shrimp, which typically generate the most value. And this season’s shrimp population is one of the better years.
But greater latitude and a healthy population didn’t bring out the usual fleet. There were noticeably fewer shrimp boats, Reaves said Tuesday. It’s a clear example of the troubled market shrimpers are up against.
“The shrimp market is kind of a mess right now,” Reaves said. “It’s hard for a lot of shrimpers to make it.”
Fuel prices – at over $3 dollars a gallon – are slightly lower than last year, but they are still high for what the boats burn through in a day. Reaves’ 70-foot boat that can hold up to 30,000 pounds of shrimp averages 200 gallons daily.
To boot, the Southern Shrimp Alliance said the excessive amount of farm-raised shrimp flooding the United States’ market has dropped domestic prices, according to previous reporting by The Island Packet.
The alliance, representing shrimp fishermen and processors in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas, pressed the states’ governors seeking a region-wide fishery resource disaster declaration, The Island Packet reported. The “unprecedented catastrophic crises” is threatening the very existence of the U.S. shrimp fishing, the alliance said.
Craig Reaves, Sea Eagle Market owner and Cameron’s brother, told the newspaper in September that there was “nobody in the shrimping industry right now alive, above ground, that has seen anything close to this.”
In South Carolina, shrimp harvest and values for the spring and fall seasons, which runs April through December, have trended downward in the past five years, according to the state’s Department of Natural Resources.
In 2021, 3.13 million head on pounds of shrimp, harvested via trawl, were reported in South Carolina. The following year that number dropped to 1.96 million pounds. Between 25% and 26% came from Beaufort County dealers in 2021 and 2022, SCDNR said.
This year, despite high fuel costs, Reaves’ shrimp prices are lower but he is still afloat. As shrimpers battle the beleaguered industry, he said shrimp enthusiasts should be picky. When eating out, ask where the shrimp is coming from. He urged people to support local seafood docks and fisherman.
Simply put by Reaves: “Demand local domestic shrimp.”
