In the wake of the pandemic and a series of devastating hurricanes, Rural LISC responded with relief grants to entrepreneurs and support for business development organizations, helping buoy a critical rural sector: Louisiana Gulf fisheries. Read on to learn about the people, groups and places touched by LISC's $3.2 million investment in nurturing resiliency for the heritage industry.
When the tide turns on the first day of the Louisiana Gulf Coast’s spring shrimp season, commercial fisher Mike Frederick would normally be at the wheel of his 30-foot shrimp boat, steering from his dock near Holly Beach toward a two-mile stretch of bayou that meanders through the marshes of Calcasieu Lake. Frederick, 68, who has been working these same brackish inland waters, where Louisiana brown shrimp, “brownies,” thrive in the spring and early summer, and the sweeter white shrimp appear in the fall, since he was a student at the local high school in 1970s. “I’m proud to say it’s the only job I know, and I love it. I love the challenge of it,” he says. “Shrimp are so smart, I like to say I only catch the dumb ones.”
But when this year’s shrimp season opened in March, Frederick Fisheries LLC, like a lot of other sole-proprietors and family-owned businesses that make up Louisiana’s diverse and proudly resilient Gulf Coast fisheries—the second-largest industry in the country, after Alaska—didn’t have a boat on the water. These are uniquely hard times for Louisiana’s shrimpers and crabbers, oyster harvesters and crawfishers, who face a range of challenges from oil spills and overseas competition to rising sea levels and massive land reclamation projects that have altered salinity of the coastline’s lakes and bays, threatening a way of life handed down through generations.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused supply-chain disruptions and had shut down the tourism and convention trade in New Orleans and Houston, on which a large part of the market for the state’s $1.3 billion seafood sector depends. Then, the history-making Atlantic hurricane season of 2020 arrived, raking the state’s southwestern coast with five storms that caused catastrophic damage in the months of June to October. “They got hammered,” says Thomas Hymel, director of the Louisiana Fisheries Forward Program at LSU College of Agriculture, who has worked for a decade to support the vital sector of the state’s economy. “Boats grounded, boats sunk, docks wiped out, crabbing gear lost, buildings flattened—the whole infrastructure for seafood went flat.”
Gulf Coast fishers have seen severe weather before. But the impact of last year’s storms, which brought the industry to a standstill until infrastructure could be repaired, was unprecedented for seasoned operators like Mike Frederick. His shrimp boat survived the storm surge and 150 mph winds of Hurricane Laura last August intact only to be crushed under the weight of a building that was blown off its foundations. “When you see a 30 by 50-foot building on top of your boat, you get discouraged real quick,” he says. Frederick immediately began repairing the boat by hand on his own. Yet with his means of earning income completely cut off, his recovery, like that of hard-hit small businesses all across Louisiana’s southwestern coast, has progressed slowly.
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External efforts to help in the region’s rebound began almost as quickly. Already responding to economic disruptions caused by the pandemic, Rural LISC—which focuses on addressing the challenges of rural communities, including chronic wealth disparities and a long history of underinvestment in those areas—immediately pivoted, opening its financial relief efforts up to seafood operators who had also been hit by the storms. LISC’s partners in the region, nonprofits such as Project Hope, the Center for Disaster Philanthropy and the Black-led Foundation for Louisiana, which focuses on BIPOC communities that experience a disproportionate impact from natural disasters, channeled corporate and private funds to address immediate needs like housing for the displaced, hygiene kits for homes without water and PPE supplies to stop the spread of COVID-19.
With support from Lowe’s, LISC disbursed direct emergency relief grants to 165 small business owners, many of them in seafood and related industries. “We targeted key rural economic sectors, and in Louisiana, that’s the fisheries,” says Caitlin Cain, VP and director of Rural LISC. “For many people in these communities, you grow up on the water and fishing and seafood is woven into the rhythm of your life, whether it’s your job or crawfish boils with the family or just getting out on the water on the weekends. So when a storm comes through to the degree of the disasters we’ve seen in southwestern Louisiana and wipes out the sea food industry, it also knocks out a portion of that culture.”
Shane Morein, the captain of a charter fishing boat that caters to tourists drawn to the hotel-casinos in Lake Charles, Louisiana, has known the area’s fishing grounds since he was a child growing up on the water. After Hurricane Laura decimated the resort and destroyed 85 percent of his family home, he experienced one of the worst seasons of his working life. “I probably would have done maybe 20 charter trips in September and October and instead I had one, on October 31,” he says. With a $20,000 grant from LISC, he was able to repair and upgrade equipment on his 23-foot boat and be ready to take on passengers again when the charter fishing business began “kicking up” earlier this year, he says.
Part of LISC’s $3.2 million investment in the region came in the form of capacity-building grants for business development organizations (BDOs) that provide technical assistance to businesses along the coast. “That can be everything from helping the owners to understand the SBA’s Payroll Protection Plan, helping them to think about compliance with everything that’s required by the state treasury department to take advantage of procurement opportunities, helping them consider e-commerce opportunities and how to actually go on line and get a website,” says LISC’s Cain.
One LISC partner, the Iberia Development Foundation, is a community and business development organization offering a wide range of services to the economically and ethnically diverse coastal communities in Iberia Parish and beyond, from natural disaster-preparedness training for fishers, shrimpers and crabbers of local, Vietnamese, Mexican and Cambodian origin, to a fresh produce distribution program for the elderly and under-resourced. In 2020, the Iberia, La.-based BDO helped to establish the Hurricane Laura Relief Fund, which served families who lost shrimp fishing boats in the storm, and has so far resulted in the completed rebuilding or replacement of six of those boats.
In addition, working with a $30,000 grant from LISC, the BDO has provided nearly 200 small businesses, the majority women- and minority owned, with technical assistance in the form of webinars, workshops and one-on-one coaching largely focused on connecting those in need with grant-makers, credit unions and other lenders. “The equity of getting the information out was very important to us. We want to make sure that small businesses of all shapes and sizes have access to the great opportunities that are out there,” says Mike Tarantino, Iberia Development Foundation’s president and CEO. He adds that the outreach effort was particularly helped by LISC providing grant application materials in a variety of languages spoken by local constituents.
“So many families had lost their ability temporarily to make a living,” says Tarantino. “We wanted to help these folks get back on their feet.”
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Temporary relief measures alone, however, will not be enough to fully restore the Louisiana seafood industry, which even before the storms and COVID-19 pandemic faced stiff headwinds in the form of foreign competition, stagnating domestic seafood prices and the loss of critical coastal wetlands due to land subsidence where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico and rising sea levels caused by global warming. “We’re losing a football field here every 90 minutes to climate change,” says LISC’s Caitlin Cain. At the same time, seafood imports to the U.S. have tripled in the past two decades, driven by the rapid expansion of low-cost fish- and shrimp-farming operations (aquaculture) in China, India, Indonesia and Ecuador. Some 90 percent of the seafood eaten in American homes and restaurants now comes from overseas, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
Paradoxically, this country is also a $5 billion per year seafood exporter, due in part to the global popularity of premium Alaska crab, Pacific salmon and Maine lobsters. Efforts are now underway to position the Gulf Coast’s distinctive wild-caught seafood in this high end of the market, instead of the commodity sector where the competition from international suppliers is most intense, according to a 2020 study of coastal fisheries conducted by the Meridian Institute and the University of Louisiana-Lafayette’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Development Center.
But they too face structural challenges, says Louisiana Fisheries Forward’s Thomas Hymel. “As opposed to Alaska, where there are large fleets of fishing boats with corporate owners and marketing people, here it’s all small businesses. It’s a heritage industry in coastal Louisiana, made up of a lot of people who have been surviving off this coast and its bountiful seafood production for years.”
Historically, the region’s family-owned fisheries have sold their catches to large processing plants that package and ship frozen seafood to food service companies, wholesalers and restaurant chains. Now, with technical assistance and marketing expertise provided by the region’s BDOs and state-supported economic development agencies, more and more “mom-and-pop” plants have opened along the coast, producing top-quality, hand-processed seafood products that appeal to health-conscious buyers and people who concerned about the origins of the foods they prepare and consume.
Direct-to-consumer retail websites like the Louisiana Direct Seafood now indicate where and how the seafood products they offer were harvested. The website flourished during the pandemic, when online grocery shopping became the norm. At the weekly Delcambre Seafood and Farmer’s Market in Delcambre, La., where fin fish, shrimp and oysters are sold straight from the boat to the public, vendors regularly sell out of seafood before the end of the day.
“Direct marketing has exploded,” says Hymel, who credits customers who take an interest in the long-term survival of the industry. “We live in a time when there’s a huge interest in people buying food from real humans who a have a story, who have a name. And Louisiana seafood has got that.”
More innovative marketing strategies are currently being developed. “One of the interesting pilot programs allows individuals to actually correspond in real time with the captain of a ship as he or she is fishing for shrimp or redfish or whatever it is that day. You can see what’s coming on board and negotiate a price and then buy it at dockside,” says Cain.
But the challenges to profitability are equally robust. Logistical limitations mean that shipping local seafood to the nation’s major markets is prohibitively expensive, and, with chronically low access to capital, many of the industry’s independent operators lack the means to invest in new technologies and even basic necessities such as homes and automobiles.
With LISC’s financial support in a time of crisis, “we’re offering breathing room where there was none before,” says Cain. “It’s the ability to exhale and to allow some of these small businesses to think through long-term strategies—to invest in e-commerce versus some other portion of the business, for instance—as they search for new opportunities for growth. That’s what Rural LISC is trying to do: to help businesses think about being more resilient in whatever context the future may be.”
