While many American business owners are bracing for potential negative impacts of a trade war triggered by President Donald Trump’s tariffs, Louisiana’s Acy Cooper and his fellow shrimpers are pleading for such protections as foreign producers dump shrimp in the U.S. and crater prices in the process.
As the News Star reports, about 200 members of the Louisiana Shrimpers Association, of which Cooper is president, have threatened to go on strike without some action either from the Gulf Coast processors who buy their shrimp or from the president in the forms of tariffs or quotas.
“We were getting $1 a pound in the 1980s; now we’re getting 55 cents,” Cooper said as he prepared to spend another night on his boat casting his skimmer nets during the white shrimp season that began in August. “(Striking) is a last resort, but we have to show the processors we’re not going to work for nothing. Our communities are dying.”
The brown shrimp season, in which shrimpers fish during the day, runs from late April through July.
“They began dumping right when our season was going to start; there was an increase of 20 percent in foreign shrimp from January to June,” Cooper said.
He said most of the foreign shrimp is either produced in India and Indonesia, which aren’t subject to tariffs, or funneled through those two countries to avoid tariffs. “We’ve been fighting this since 2002,” Cooper said.
He said tariffs would help, but he believes quotas would be more effective in leveling the playing field.
“We can’t compete and it’s threatening an entire way of life,” he said. “If something isn’t done we’re going to lose a whole culture.”
