Gulf Fishermen Struggling Long Before BP Oil Spill

NEW ORLEANS (July 15) -- The BP oil spill may have put the plight of Gulf of Mexico fishermen in the national spotlight, but they've been struggling for years. All the damage done in the past few months is just the latest in a long series of challenges faced by the industry.

"To put it bluntly," Henry Poynot, who has owned Big Fisherman Seafood in uptown New Orleans for 26 years, told AOL News, "seafood is a dying industry, for wild-caught seafood, for the fishermen and for the seafood market."

Since the early 1990s, the toughest ongoing challenge that the gulf seafood industry has been facing is competition from cheap, farmed imports from places like China and Vietnam.

"It was always a commodity market, but that just took it to anther level," Ewell Smith, president of the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board, told AOL News. "You cannot compete on price against imported products."

A large number of shrimpers simply couldn't compete. According to the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, in 1989 there were 16,500 shrimpers in the state of Louisiana, but in 2007 there were only 5,243. Hurricane Katrina also took a heavy toll on the fishing fleet.

The shrimpers and fishermen that remain have been working, both through legal action and marketing, to distinguish their products from imports, but it's an uphill battle against imported products that cost as little as a third of the domestics. Poynot refuses to sell imported seafood, but he says that in some stores people will come in and see a pack of crawfish tails with a Cajun name and assume it's a Louisiana product -- without checking the back to see that they're from China.

And that's when the seafood was labeled properly at all. Last year, federal investigators began looking into processors cutting costs by mixing imported products in with domestics and labeling it all Louisiana.

Poynot has also watched the area's culture shift away from his products. People used to come into his store and buy whole ice chests of head-on shrimp, but these days people would rather buy a prepackaged pound of ready-to-eat.

"It used to be you couldn't buy shrimp in this city with the heads off," he said. "It's a new generation, with everything with technology and texting, and cell phones, cars with leather and televisions, and people do not want to go home and peel shrimp."

Earlier this year, there seemed to be hope for the Louisiana seafood industry. Recent cultural shifts toward valuing local foods put a premium on domestic products. Extensive branding work and bitter fights with processors and importers over anti-dumping actions helped boost the price of shrimp back up to where many of the shrimpers would have been able to recoup their earlier losses.

"This was our year," Acy Cooper, head of the Louisiana Shrimpers Association, told AOL News. "This was the year for us to come out of the hole we been in."

And then the oil came. Nobody is certain how the oil will affect the gulf ecosystem in the long term, but so far shrimp and oysters have been the hardest-hit products, which has even forced the closing of New Orleans' legendary PandJ Oysters.

Cooper worries that if the oil damages hatcheries and juvenile shrimp populations, it could signal a crushing blow in a long fight. And despite the fact that the majority of the gulf remains open to fishing, a marketer like Smith worries that the biggest challenge his industry will face in the coming years is public perception.

For his part, however, Cooper isn't going to quit.

"We been in business too long," Cooper said. "I been fishing all my life, I'm 50 years old; my dad's 74, he's still fishing; my two sons are fishing. At 50 and 74, what are we gonna do?