PORT SULPHUR, La. — For more than four decades the 31-foot trawler Lacy Kay was the backbone of Acy Cooper’s small fleet. He named the boat in 1983 by combining his newborn daughter’s first name with his wife’s middle name. This spring the vessel sits tied to a dock in Venice, Louisiana, while Cooper takes work ferrying oil-rig crews to offshore platforms.
Cooper, who learned shrimping from his father and went to sea at 15, says he took the job off the water after diesel prices jumped more than 50 percent in a matter of months. “I’m making money,” he said of the new gig. “Not what I would be making, but you take what you can get.” He added bluntly: “Help us with these fuel prices. We’re farmers of the sea. We want something to fall back on when something like this happens.”
The spike in diesel — rising from about $3.50 a gallon to more than $5 by spring — has been driven in part by geopolitical disruptions tied to the war with Iran and interruptions in traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. For a shrimper operating on thin margins, that kind of fuel shock can be devastating. Large offshore freezer vessels can use 9,000 to 12,000 gallons on a single 30-day trip; one Alabama operator told industry advocates he paid roughly $47,000 on fuel before leaving port this year, about $20,000 more than a year earlier.
Even without higher fuel costs, many Gulf shrimpers were already struggling. Decades of imported, mostly farm-raised shrimp have flooded U.S. markets; by 2023 foreign product accounted for more than 90 percent of American shrimp consumption. NOAA data show the Gulf fleet’s share of the domestic market has plunged from nearly 30 percent in 1984 to roughly 4.5 percent in 2023.
That competition, combined with long-term environmental changes, has squeezed dock prices and catches. Adjusted for inflation, dockside prices for shrimp have fallen from more than $6 a pound 40 years ago to under $2 a pound in 2023. Gulf shrimp revenue fell from about $489 million in 2021 to $221 million in 2023. The number of shrimpers in Louisiana, once close to 20,000 in the mid-1980s, is now below 1,400.
Cooper says he now needs to bring back at least 1,000 pounds each trip just to break even. This season, unpredictable weather and habitat loss have made that difficult: a late cold front pushed shrimp into deeper water, and decades of coastal erosion have reduced marshland that once sheltered juvenile shrimp.
Blake Price, director of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, which advocates for commercial shrimpers from North Carolina to Texas, says the industry was already weakened before the recent fuel surge. “This industry could absorb an increased fuel cost a lot better if our markets were strong and hadn’t been flooded with foreign, farm-raised product,” he said.
There were brief signs of improvement last year after tariffs on imported shrimp were imposed, but those measures were later struck down by the Supreme Court, Price said, and the market slipped again. Shrimpers and their trade groups are urging Washington to act. They want measures that would prevent U.S. taxpayer money from subsidizing foreign shrimp farms that undercut American fishermen, and they point to legislation known as the Save Our Shrimpers Act, which passed the House and awaits Senate consideration.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has also created a new Office of Seafood, a step the Southern Shrimp Alliance hopes will lead to assistance programs similar to those available to land-based farmers. “We’re not asking for checks or a payout,” Price said. “We just want a level playing field.”
Cooper, who voted for President Trump, said he supports the administration’s broader approach to Iran and believes recent actions reflect a willingness to confront long-standing threats. But his immediate concern is economic survival. Until fuel prices and market conditions change, he said, the Lacy Kay will stay at the dock, waiting for the winds and the math to shift in favor of shrimpers who want to keep fishing for a living.