Montegut, La. — The Anna Marie isn’t your typical shrimp boat. To start, it has a full-size kitchen, air conditioning and satellite television. From his captain’s chair, owner Lance Nacio can plot his course and check water depth and tidal flows, all with the push of a button on a slick gadget not much larger than an iPad. But the most unusual addition to the Anna Marie is a set of high-tech plate freezers on its deck, which transform the boat into a kind of floating processor. With a crew of three, the Anna Marie can stay out at sea up to three times as long as a traditional shrimp boat, pulling in as much as 16,000 pounds on each journey.
The 40-year-old, with a doe’s brown eyes and a neat goatee, grew up shrimping the way southern Louisianians have for generations: He netted what he could and sold it fresh on the dock to processors and other middlemen at the market price. Today, Nacio catches and processes the shrimp himself and sets his own price. He is a savvy marketer, as comfortable (if not as happy) negotiating prices via cellphone or offering samples to celebrity chefs as he is out on the water. With customers including restaurants, Whole Foods Market and the famed Berkeley Bowl in California, Nacio has transformed shrimping into a sustainable venture, for the environment and his family.
(Sean Gardner/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) - Part of shrimper Lance Nacio’s catch.
“The shrimping industry in America has been struggling for a long while. Lance saw the writing on the wall,” says Frank Brigsten, a customer and chef-owner of Brigsten’s, the renowned New Orleans restaurant. “He is a visionary in his profession.”
Nacio grew up in Lafourche Parish, about an hour outside New Orleans. His family, like others on the bayou, made a living from the land. They shrimped, trapped furs and grew much of what they ate in a backyard garden. After leaving school, Nacio worked in the oil business for nearly a decade. But it was not as satisfying as shrimping. “When you are working in the oil fields, you have a boss, and you’re under pressure all the time,” he says. “When you’re shrimping, you’re your own boss, and you create your own destiny.”
But for the last decade, many Louisiana shrimpers’ destiny has seemed grim, though not necessarily for the reasons most consumers might imagine. To be sure, hurricanes Katrina and Rita and last year’s BP oil spill in the Gulf took a toll on the predominantly small, family-run fisheries. But the real peril to the industry is imported, farmed shrimp from South America and Southeast Asia, the kind that can be produced and shipped cheaply enough to transform the product, once considered a luxury, into a run-of-the-mill item on the $6.99 all-you-can-eat buffet. Today, shrimp is the United States’ number-one seafood import. About 90 percent of the market, about 1.2 billion pounds, is imported annually.
The impact of imported shrimp intensified in 2001. International competition ramped up, dumping millions of tons of cheap shrimp into the American market. Prices for domestic shrimpers on the dock plummeted just as the price of diesel, shrimpers’ main operational cost, jumped. “A few years earlier, we were paying 60 cents a gallon [for diesel] and we were getting $3 a pound for shrimp,” says Nacio. “Then, all of a sudden, we’re paying $3.10 a gallon and getting just $1.50. A lot of the fishermen worked themselves out of business.”
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