October 30, 2023 — The U.S. Department of Commerce has determined fishery disasters occurred in several fisheries in Alaska, California, Louisiana, and Oregon, opening the door for those fisheries to receive federal financial assistance.
Most notably, the department determined a disaster took place across all Oregon chinook salmon fisheries from 2018 to 2020.
October 14, 2023 — Ocean Harvesters and Westbank Fishing are extremely concerned with last week’s decision by the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission to approve a Notice of Intent (NOI) that would impose a one-mile buffer zone for menhaden fishing along the state’s coastline and a 3-mile buffer around Cameron Parish in Southwest Louisiana.
We believe that this decision is not supported by any scientific evidence and will be economically harmful to the menhaden fishery and Louisiana’s fishing communities.
We believe Louisiana’s waters should be shared by all user groups. The new coastwide buffer zone is not necessary for menhaden management. Rather, it’s the result of a long-debated, often political, user conflict that’s already been considered and defeated by the Louisiana Legislature and this Commission. Simply put, these new buffer zones prioritize recreational anglers over commercial fishermen.
Additionally, the Commission chose to move forward without consideration of economic data. As numerous fishing captains have previously testified before the Commission, this NOI will have real and lasting economic harm and threaten the long-term viability of their operations.
September 17, 2023 — Gov. John Bel Edwards has requested an emergency declaration for disaster relief for Louisiana shrimpers amid a flood of foreign shrimp that has driven dockside prices to below $1 per pound.
Edwards made the request in late August at the behest of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, which penned a letter to the governor in August seeking the declaration, the first step in securing disaster relief funding for shrimpers from the federal government.
“Louisiana will be pursuing a federal fisheries disaster declaration from the U.S. Department of Commerce,” Edwards wrote to association president Acy Cooper.
September 2, 2023 — U.S. House Republicans are preparing to investigate a recent court settlement that pits one of the world’s most endangered marine mammals against potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues and thousands of jobs for Louisiana.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-Jefferson, said President Joe Biden’s administration created the confrontation by using the settlement of a federal lawsuit in Maryland to circumvent time-consuming environmental regulatory procedures.
The Aug. 23 deal expands the protected Gulf of Mexico habitat of Rice’s whales — the only indigenous whale in American waters.
Only about 100 Rice’s whales exist, mostly off Florida’s coast, where there is little oil and gas activity. Recently, sonar findings, a confirmed sighting in 2017 and an unconfirmed sighting in July indicate that the whales — which measure about 40 feet long and weigh about 60,000 pounds — may also live off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas, where there is far more energy activity.
August 28, 2o23 — After a long wait, Louisiana’s fisheries finally will receive $58 million in federal aid to offset disaster impacts, U.S. Rep. Garret Graves announced.
The Baton Rouge area congressman worked to secure the federal assistance in 2020 after multiple disasters affected the state’s fisheries in 2019.
Graves said in a news release the federal government has taken nearly four years to deliver the funding after it was awarded.
“There is no excuse for the bureaucracy to take four years for the disaster relief we secured to actually be made available, but these funds will be invaluable,” he said in the announcement. “We have promised the seafood industry we would not stop our fight to bring them relief while working to reform the broken fisheries disaster process. We will continue to work with our fishing community to cut through the red tape and make this program functional.”
August 12, 2023 — Over thousands of years, the Mississippi River wended its way through the lush and dense wetlands of the Barataria Basin in what’s now south-central Louisiana. As it flowed south on its way to the sea, the river continually poured sediment into the basin, gifting it with fresh, nutrient-rich river mud that replenished the land and prevented coastal erosion. But 20th-century innovations like dams and levees stopped the river’s natural systems. This, in combination with recent sea-level rise and the constant battering of supercharged hurricane seasons, means the sea now gnaws steadily at the bottom of the state, causing gradual but catastrophic land loss. Since 1932, the Barataria has lost 17 percent of its land. It’s predicted to lose another 200-plus square miles in the next 20 years.
To combat this, Louisiana officials broke ground Thursday on an ambitious, $2.92 billion project to divert sediment from the Mississippi River into the basin, mimicking the natural processes of the river’s flow in an attempt to save the state’s disappearing coast. The initiative is the first step in Louisiana’s $50 billion Coastal Master Plan, funded in part by a lawsuit settlement from the devastating Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. Though many laud the project, some worry it will harm existing wildlife in the basin, while taking a very long time to do its work.
The main event for the mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project will be “punching a hole in the levee” that prevents the Mississippi River from regularly overflowing its banks and changing course, said Bren Haase, the chair of the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. The project involves installing a complex gate structure through the Mississippi River’s levee, allowing some water to flow into a channel, which will then empty out over the basin and wash into the sea, carrying mud, silt, and clay with it to create new land. It’ll take five years to build. Over 50 years, the diversion project should add 21 square miles of land to the basin, according to Haase.
August 10, 2023 — Nearly $3 billion in settlement money from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster that devastated the Gulf Coast and killed hundreds of thousands of marine animals is now funding a massive ecosystem restoration in southeastern Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish.
The flat, sparsely populated land divided by the Mississippi River delta is marbled by bayous and bays. Farms, fishing camps and shrimp boats share the region with oil rig supply vessels and industrial storage. And it’s about to host a vast undertaking meant to mimic Mother Nature: Enormous gates will soon be incorporated into a flood protection levee.
The aim is to divert some of the river’s sediment-laden water into a new channel and guide it into the Barataria Basin southeast of New Orleans.
If it works, the sediment will settle out in the basin and gradually restore land that has been steadily disappearing for decades. State coastal officials call it a first-of-its-kind project they are certain will work, even as climate change-induced rising sea levels threaten the disappearing coast.
August 10, 2023 — The Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission announced the opening dates for the fall inshore shrimp season Aug. 7.
Meanwhile, Louisiana lawmakers have called on Congress to protect the domestic seafood industry as shrimp harvesters face low prices due to large amounts of imported shrimp.
The Louisiana Shrimp Association joined in a letter that said the influx of imported shrimp has proven especially problematic for domestic harvesters. Nineteen other allied organizations and companies, representing more than 4,000 seafood businesses of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic region also signed onto the letter.
July 26, 2023 — The Louisiana shrimp industry is in crisis; putting our 15,000 jobs and $1.3 billion industry at risk.
During the legislative session, hundreds of shrimpers, dock owners and processors marched on the State Capitol to call out unwanted competition from imported shrimp.
Louisiana plays a significant role in the U.S. shrimp market, accounting for 25% of the nation’s demand. But imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Ecuador are flooding U.S. markets, resulting in distressed prices for our product.
Absent an outright ban or a cap and control mechanism on imported shrimp, it becomes increasingly challenging to sustain our livelihoods. Additionally, imports raise concerns about cheap foreign labor practices and potential health risks.
Expanding testing and enforcing country-of-origin labeling are common sense solutions to ensure consumer safety and awareness. But our pleas for assistance to our federal and state lawmakers continue to go unanswered.
To add insult to injury, we face another threat by Louisiana’s recreational and for-hire charter fishermen who have suggested there need to be arbitrary and scientifically unsubstantiated limits on commercial fishing, including shrimping and Gulf menhaden fishing, to reduce incidental bycatch of speckled trout and redfish.
While conservation efforts of these stressed species are important, singling out the commercial fishing sector without addressing the root causes of reckless overfishing by the tens of thousands of unmonitored anglers off Louisiana’s coast is misguided. Louisiana’s commercial fisheries follow sound fisheries management practices.
We are heavily regulated, guided by science and sustainability. We will not allow others to selectively shift blame to us when they need to do more to preserve and protect their catch.
Failure to address these challenges will have far-reaching consequences, potentially resulting in the loss of not just our industry but a cultural heritage deeply intertwined with our coastal communities.
ACY COOPER
president, Louisiana Shrimp Association
July 26, 2023 — Last week, the White House announced the first offshore wind power auction in the Gulf of Mexico will take place next month.
The Biden administration will allocate leases for a 102,480-acre area of federal waters off the coast of Lake Charles in Louisiana and two areas offshore Galveston, Texas totalling around 200,000 acres.
In May, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) found no significant environmental impact from offshore wind leasing on a 30-million-acre area, paving the way for the first lease sales that could host 3.6 GW of capacity.
A number of companies have prequalified for the sale, including oil and gas groups Shell, Equinor and TotalEnergies, but the first turbines could in fact be installed in Louisiana state waters.
Louisiana aims to install 5 GW of offshore wind by 2035 and the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is in talks with two offshore wind developers for projects in state waters, DNR confirmed to Reuters Events.