(somber music) (engine whirring) (ambient music) - [Frank] Oh yeah.

My name's Frank Parker and I'm a sixth generation commercial fishermen from Biloxi, Mississippi.

I absolutely knew I was gonna be a fishermen forever.

I mean, I can remember as a young child, that's all I ever wanted to do was fish, you know, whether it was a crabs or fish or shrimp, I was gonna be on that water; I've known that my whole life.

(engine whirring) I started commercial fishing by myself when I was 13 years old, running crab traps before and after school.

So I mean, I've been running these waters for 38 years now, you know.

So to me it's kinda, you know, I know this water like the back of my hand.

(water splashing) (engine whirring) (gulls squawking) - [Maria] That should be the five pound.

So this is 30 and 10, 30 and 10 is 40.

My name's Maria Tran.

I'm a mom of eight, (laughs) eight kids, I have eight kids.

Yeah, it's four boys and four girls.

And shrimping, I had... Shrimping was not my plan.

(laughs) And 30.

Here you go.

Thank you, that'll be 40.

- [Man] Yes ma'am.

- Enjoy your crab, okay.

- [Man] yes ma'am, thank you.

- You take care now.

- [Man] You too.

- My plan was get a good education and be a doctor like every normal kid.

(laughs) When I came over in 1975, I was only four years old.

Most of the people that built the shrimping business and then came over from Vietnam, had no mean of, you know, of English, had language barrier, education.

So the only thing that people make a living out of is shrimping and shrimping is- for them, they pick up really fast.

Yeah, they love the hard work because you make money and they could support the family.

(pensive music) There's two types of shrimp boats.

One that goes out for a month, they stay out a month.

And those are the people that can make the money.

'Cause they stay out there for a whole month, they collect, you know, they collect, collect, collect and accumulate the shrimp then they come in and they sell it to the factory.

With us, it's local, we like to sell ours fresh, and we only can go out, like at nighttime.

I will leave the dock at 5:00 and comes in at 7:30.

So this, you know, you don't have enough time.

So we catch as much as we can and supply our customer, the local, with fresh shrimp.

And with all this rain is making a very hard.

(laughs) (ambient music) (gentle rainfall) - [Ryan] So here in Mississippi, we've had a plethora of manmade and natural disasters.

Just looking back in recent history, it really started with hurricane Katrina, that knocked out about half of the commercial shrimp fleet.

Then we had the BP oil spill in 2010, and that really has decimated our wild oyster reefs, which is one of the biggest fisheries on the Mississippi coast.

We've had next to zero harvest for about the past 10 years since the BP spill.

But then we've been plagued with these Bonnet Carré Spillway disasters, which we had one in 2016, we had another one in 2018, again in 2019, and in 2020, with 2019 being a record opening, a record number of days it was open.

And so we just, you know, these guys are tough, these families are tough, but there's only so much you can take.

And you know, they've been dealt a very tough hand.

(somber music) (engine whirring) - [Frank] And that's what's sitting in right there, look.

Dead stingrays, dead catfish.

Our season this year in our inshore waters between Louisiana and Alabama, it's probably been the worst year I've ever seen in 30 years.

And the main thing is just with the amount of fresh water we've had.

We've had excessive rainfall, you know, all throughout this area, so- But it's been, it's been really, really bad.

- Too much water will create the imbalance of the pH, meaning it's gonna kill the fish, shrimp, you know, It will drive them further out somewhere.

And we're not able to make a living out of it.

And I think it was like two years ago, when they open the spillway, there was a lot of what, algae?

See, that's the thing that cause algae because the pH in the water is not consistent.

- We had a lot of pollute- they kept calling it fresh water.

Well when that was, that was water out of the Mississippi River that comes from the, from Minnesota all the way down the Mississippi River.

And that is polluted fresh water; it's not fresh water, it's polluted fresh water.

And because we had all that polluted fresh water with all these chemicals in it, it caused some major blue-green algae blooms, other algae blooms, and it put a tarnish on our seafood, you know.

- [Maria] Hello!

- [Man] Got shrimp?

- Only got the long, the jumbo kind, only the jumbo today.

- [Man] Those are a little bit too big.

- [Maria] Yes, we are sold out on the small meat of this morning, but this is the only thing we have left for the day.

- [Man] Yeah that's, you don't have anything, though?

- [Maria] On the shrimp, no, not right now.

- [Man] You think you will later on today?

- [Maria] No, not- by hopefully tomorrow.

- What we've seen here over the last several years is due to all the plethora of disasters that we've had, the productivity of the fishing vessels have fallen off, the consistency of the availability of the product has fallen off.

And because of that, you don't see people looking for product, to buy fresh shrimp right off the vessels as much as you would say, 5 to 10 years ago.

- Yes I do.

(laughs) You know, yes I do, I do.

Yeah, how we gonna pay the bill, you know?

Yeah, I gave up everything to- like I said, I gave everything up to concentrate on this job and now, you know, too much rain.

It's just, it's just very depressing when you go out there at night and you're catching less than a hundred pounds.

You can go all night and not even make it up.

You don't even catch enough to make up for the fuel and ice.

- [Frank] It's feast or famine a lot of times, and you have to have really good money management skills because sometimes you make really good money, you know.

When you have that money in your hand, it's like, "Oh, we're gonna buy this, buy that."

Well there's weeks where you're not gonna make a whole lot of money, you know.

This year in particular, I haven't worked hardly at all on my shrimp boat, just because it hasn't been economically feasible, you know.

When it costs you with the price of fuels went up this year substantially since last year, but the price of shrimp is up, but it's still not enough shrimp to catch, to make it a bigger profit margin.

That's why I've been crabbing.

The overhead's a lot lower so the profit margin's bigger.

(ominous music) - [Ryan] When we look at global market factors that have impacted the seafood industry over here on the coast, the importation of shrimp.

Farm, mostly farm-raised shrimp coming from overseas from other countries has really put a lot of pressure on the shrimp industry, in particular.

We normally would see shrimp prices much higher than they are now 30 years ago.

- [Ben] For the past 30 years, fishing, especially shrimping, here in the US, here in the Gulf, is very difficult.

We have to spend so much money to fuel up the diesel tank to go out- the fishing four days, six days.

And then when they come back with a catch, the price too low.

Sometimes the sale that they get out of the cost that they get out of the shrimp has not been enough to pay for the diesel.

Now why should the prices are going down?

We know that for a fact, more than 90% of what we eat here in the US is imported.

And foreign countries, they have lax regulations, they can do whatever they want as long as it satisfies the paperwork and produce loose products at very low cost to bring them in here.

- [Ryan] A lot of these imports that come into the country, they're subsidized by their host countries, where they're being produced.

So that allows them to put them on the market much cheaper and undercut our fishermen here in America.

And you know, when a state where everything is, prices are inflating across the board, the cost of materials and supplies are rising with your product being stable or even decreasing, it makes for very tough market conditions.

- You know, it was just hard to compete with the rise in operating costs on a global market, you know, there's still countries over there where people can make a dollar a day and they're doing good.

And it's just hard for us to compete on that level here in the United States.

- [Ben] I went through almost every major seafood product being consumed in the country, compared our production here by our growers or by our fisherman and the imports that we buy from everywhere, the price that wholesalers pay for our growers and the price that our wholesalers pay for those imported products.

One country sells it at half the price what we sell here in the US.

US product, foreign country A, half.

Foreign country B, 75%.

So who can compete with that?

There's no way.

So the margins are getting slimmer and slimmer.

Sometimes one cent, two cents, maybe 5 cents for a dollar sale.

That's hard, you know.

The captain, a crew, and maybe another crew, and we've been out depending on the size of the boat, a 5 cents per dollar sale profits is not good enough to keep them in the boat.

It's gonna kill this industry here.

- Lesser shrimp, lesser boat, less boat.

Yeah, for sure.

Because I see a lot of people that...

The older generation had gone out; has retired.

So, and a lot of people been selling their boat from left to right.

It's not continuing.

The shrimping business is not continuing in the family, it's not, not being carried on, the generation's not carrying on.

- It means my hair is grayer, means the folks working in the fleet are getting older and older over time.

And no younger ones are coming and joining the fleet to fish.

- [Frank] Graying of the fleet is a very huge problem.

Like I said, when I was 26 years old, I bought my first big shrimp boat, and man, I was, you know, I was the youngest guy out there with this big ol' boat.

And you know, here it is 20 years later and I'm still the youngest guy out there.

I look behind me and there's not a whole lot of guys coming up and it's kinda scary.

- Right now what we hear from the fishing families is they don't want their children even going on the boats.

They want them to go to college and learn another trade because it's been so difficult on this current generation that they don't want their kids to have to experience what they've been going through.

- The new generation see how hard their parents had to work for it and not make enough.

And they don't want that.

They want a stable job, you know, that could meet the ends instead of working their butt off, and at the end, nothing.

- [Ryan] I can tell you just like any young person or anybody for that matter, they wanna work and they wanna get paid for their work.

And this industry here has become more like gambling, and you're rolling the dice and people don't like to work and not get paid.

And so you can't blame them for that.

- Not really.

(laughs) They don't want to do it full-time, they don't.

I mean, they will help out, you know, until we find a deckhand, you know.

but finding a really good deckhand nowadays is hard because they're not catching enough to pay for the deckhand.

So actually my kids are working for food.

(laughs) So yeah- so to keep, yeah to keep... To keep this business alive, we, you know, we have to, everybody have to do, the family have to pitch in and work together until we find a better solution.

- [Maria] We probably eventually have to sell it.

If my husband can no longer go out, they could, you know, to the aging, you know, getting older, and it all, because it's a health reason, then we probably have to sell it.

If the kids doesn't take over.

- [Ben] It's hard for a young folk to decide and join to become a crew or fishing boat 'cause the choices, there are other things that they can do.

As life becomes good for these families, they can afford to send the kids to Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and those nice universities and earn nice degrees, doctors, lawyers, pharmacist.

So once they graduate, there's no way they're gonna go back and go fishing.

- [Ryan] When I look at the graying of the fleet and the impacts on the long-term viability of the industry, I really am concerned.

I've been ringing the alarm bells about this for the past five years.

I think that in 10 years, if we don't see a course correction, we're gonna be in absolute dire straits.

With the average age of the fishermen, commercial fishermen, around 54 years of age, five more years will put that around 60.

And that's getting at a place that's...

It's gonna be a, what I would call irreparable harm, to the industry that we may never recover from that.

- Well, just like any household, children, they know that their parents are getting older.

They don't pay much attention about that, but once their parents die, that's when they realize "our parent's dead."

It's the same way with the fleet.

We don't pay much attention to the graying of the fleet.

We just pay lip service.

"We got some funding for them, we got some planning for them.

"If the young folks come and join, fine, if not."

But when these folks are gone, they're gone.

(ambient music) (gulls squawking) - [Ryan] You know, when I think about what the collapse of the seafood industry might be or what that may look like, we can already start to see pieces of that.

If you ride around these harbors from coast to coast, you'll see some boats, shrimp boats, and oyster boats beyond repair, rusted to heck and back.

These fishermen, if they're not making money, they can't maintain these vessels, which they cost a lot of money to maintain each year.

So we begin to lose these vessels.

If they don't rot away, they're sold off and they're relocated to other parts of the country.

About 20, 25 years ago, we had over 2000 licensed commercial shrimp fishermen in the state of Mississippi.

Today, we have about 300 with about half of those being active.

So we're really just a fraction of what we used to be just 25 years ago.

- [Ben] The way of life, consumption patterns of seafood as well as other commodities will drastically change.

Trade and industry will be changed.

Let's be- there's gonna be a lot of the people who are now employed in the industry from harvesting, to processing, to wholesaling, to seafood markets, restaurants, there'll be, those jobs will be gone.

And those revenues that the government gets, local, state and federal, they'll be gone.

There'll be more need for welfare checks, and that's not good... that's not good.

- [Ryan] But bigger than that, what does that mean for our local food supply?

The pandemic really highlighted how important our local food supply chains really are.

And many people saw when they went to their supermarkets during the height of that pandemic, they couldn't find beef, they couldn't find chicken, they couldn't find pork, but our boats were out working, and those people, when they couldn't find food, they were lined up at these docks, they were lined up at our seafood dealers, and they were stocking their freezers full of local seafood.

You can only imagine if we got in situation worse than what we're in at that time, how bad things could become without our local food supplies being strong and robust.

And so that's why I'm proud to advocate for domestic wild seafood, because I understand how important it is for our local food supply chain.

And so we always encourage people to ask who and where your seafood came from.

It has such a huge economic impact on the coast, and I tell people this all the time, it is the more that we can keep our dollars in the state, the stronger our state economy becomes.

It's gonna take a lot of work.

Protecting the environment, I think that's our number one threat right now.

We've got to do a lot more than we're currently doing to stop the pollution of our waters.

But then we've got to work to train and educate and probably retool the industry to be prepared for the future.

That's not gonna be the silver bullet, but it's a starting point.

And we've gotta start educating our children that this is a viable career path.

And we have to enlighten our politicians on the needs of the industry, because it's a shame to me to have the seafood industry here as one of the most, you know- that built the coast as so influential on the coast, it seems like we're forgotten now, and it's more about the tourism.

And it's something that we should never take for granted because as we're seeing it can definitely slip away from us.

- Man is smart.

As long as we work together, we develop technologies to exploit the resources around us, to feed mankind, it's tough now.

It's gonna be hard for everyone, but I think we will be able to survive.

(somber music)