Florida's Shrimping Fleet Shrinking More And More
We found an interesting article in Florida Today, farther up the coast, about the state of the shrimping industry in Florida. While most articles about today's fishing industry inevitably mention overfishing and declining populations, there's nothing about that here. The problems seem to be condos replacing fish houses along the coast, increased regulation and security, and higher fuel prices. Plus there are the cheap imports, which are killing the local shrimp industry; wild-caught shrimp can't possibly compete price-wise with the cheap shrimp coming from farms in Southeast Asia:
John Williams, executive director of the Southern Shrimp Alliance in Tarpon Springs, just returned from testifying before a House Ways and Means subcommittee on food-safety issues of imported shrimp."The United States is like a magnet for garbage," he said. "We're inspecting less than 1 percent of all these imported products, especially seafood."
When the European Union, Japan and Canada clamped down on shrimp imports, importers turned to America, Williams said.
"In 2000, 2001, the European Union, Japan and Canada banned imports from Pakistan, and Pakistan just turned around and shipped them to the United States," Williams said.
The U.S. food-service industry threw down the red carpet for these low-priced imports, now a mainstay at restaurants and grocery stores, he said.
"Check out the boxes in the Dumpsters behind restaurants," McCoy said. "A majority of the shrimp that is served in restaurants, including local restaurants, and that is sold in the local grocery stores, is not always a wild-caught product, but imported."
So pretty much the rest of the Western world deems imported shrimp unfit for consumption, but we seem to think it's okay here. We've heard some other rumblings about imported shrimp, so we wonder if this is going to be the next big food issue. For now, we're going to make sure to ask for "wild-caught" shrimp.
Shrimping flounders [Florida Today]
