Gulf Shrimpers Lost $268 Million and 1,239 Jobs. Duties on $6.2 Billion of Imports Arrived a Year Later.

Two federal records, filed eighteen months apart, describe the same collapse from opposite ends.▸ In March 2026, NOAA Fisheries' Southeast Fisheries Science Center published a technical memorandum tracking what happened to the federally permitted Gulf shrimp fleet as cheap imports took over the U.S. market: total revenue nearly halved, the number of active vessels fell by a fifth, and an estimated 1,239 full-time-equivalent crew positions disappeared between 2021 and 2023. Fourteen months before that report was published, the U.S. Department of Commerce finalized new trade duties on frozen shrimp from the four countries most blamed for the price collapse — Ecuador, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam — covering $6.2 billion of the imports Commerce itself measured in 2022. Read together, the two records show a domestic fishery that had already lost most of its money and workforce by the time its requested relief arrived, at rates that were, for most named exporters, in the low single digits.

The Southeast Fisheries Science Center's report is built from two federal data streams: NOAA's own commercial landings and dealer records, and an annual economic survey of the federally-permitted offshore fleet — the roughly 850 to 1,000 vessels that fish beyond state waters and account for about two-thirds of Gulf shrimp landings by volume.▸ The report's central finding is a price collapse: the average price paid to Gulf shrimpers, in 2023 dollars, fell from $4.64 a pound in 2021 to $2.50 in 2023, a drop the report attributes to a market where farm-raised imports made up 96% of U.S. shrimp imports by 2023, and imports overall supplied 93% of everything Americans ate. Gulf shrimp's own share of U.S. consumption fell to 4.5%.

The fleet's profit margin — net revenue over revenue — swung from plus 9.8% in 2021 to negative 6.1% in 2023, and the number of active federally-permitted vessels dropped 19% over the same period, from 1,041 to 846.▸ The report translates that contraction directly into crew income: hired captains and crew, most of whom are paid on a share-of-catch system rather than a wage, earned an estimated $78.5 million less in 2023 than in 2021. Converted into full-time-equivalent positions — accounting for both the shrinking fleet and the fewer days at sea worked by the boats that stayed active — NOAA estimates the fishery supported 635 fewer year-round positions in 2023 than in 2021, and that once the reduced work schedules of remaining crew are also counted, the effective loss reaches 1,239 positions.

The industry's own trade case moved on a separate, slower clock.▸ The American Shrimp Processors Association, based in Port Arthur, Texas, filed petitions on October 25, 2023 — during the same stretch of years the NOAA report would later document as the worst in the fishery's economics — asking Commerce to investigate whether shrimp from Ecuador, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam was being dumped or unfairly subsidized. Commerce reached its final determinations on October 22, 2024, and the resulting antidumping and countervailing duty orders were issued that December, more than a year after the petition and roughly three years after 2021, the last profitable year the NOAA report identifies for the fleet.

The rates Commerce set were mostly modest.▸ Its countervailing-duty "All-Others" rate — the rate applied to exporters not individually investigated — was 5.77% for India, 3.78% for Ecuador, 2.84% for Vietnam, and 0.71% for Indonesia, a rate low enough to count as de minimis under the statute (anything under 2%). One exporter was treated differently: Vietnam's Thong Thuan Company Limited received a 221.82% countervailing rate specifically, a penalty Commerce applied "based on adverse inferences" after finding the company had not cooperated with the investigation. That rate applies to Thong Thuan alone, not to the country's broader import volume.

Commerce's own case file put a number on the trade the duties are meant to correct: in 2022, the year its investigation used for import statistics, the U.S. brought in $2.74 billion of shrimp from India, $1.44 billion from Ecuador, $1.40 billion from Indonesia, and $645 million from Vietnam — $6.2 billion combined, against a domestic Gulf fishery whose total revenue that same general period was measured in the hundreds of millions, not billions.

Figures describe the federally-permitted Gulf shrimp fleet as covered by NOAA's technical memorandum (federal waters off five Gulf states) and the four countries named in Commerce's 2023-2024 antidumping and countervailing duty investigations. Other shrimp-exporting countries, including Thailand, are not covered by this case and are omitted here. Duty rates shown are the final "All-Others" rates as determined in October 2024; administrative reviews covering later periods were ongoing as of this writing and could revise individual company rates.