Hard Times for Mississippi's Shrimpers

Winfred Hutchinson shows off his catch.

With a late start to the season and shrimp prices the lowest they’ve been in 20 years, MPB’s Phoebe Judge reports on what is shaping up to be a rough brown shrimp season In Mississippi.

Winfred Hutchinson is standing on the docks behind the Hard Rock Casino in Biloxi selling shrimp that he caught only a few hours ago.

“Only way you can make any money is to peddle your own shrimp. If you sell to the factories that’s about all your getting is your fuel and expense back, but if you sell your own shrimp maybe sometimes you can make a little bit out of it, sometimes you just break even.”

Hutchinson has been shrimping in Biloxi his whole life, and like many Mississippi shrimpers this season is proving to be one of the hardest. With factories only paying a dollar a pound for standard size shrimp, many fisherman have decided to forgo that whole process and are trying to make a living selling directly to the consumer on the docks where they can get 2 to 3 dollars a pound.

“We just have never seen, since I have been doing this 25 years, we haven’t seen the prices as bad as they are this year.”

That’s Dave Burrage, a fisheries professor at Mississippi’s States Coastal Research and Extension Center. He says along with record low prices, the shrimp numbers this year have been hundreds of thousands of pounds off what they usually are. Prices are so bad that only 230 boats left port the opening day of the season this year, that number was 800 just five years ago. Burrage says that doesn’t bode well for the future of Mississippi’s shrimp fleet,

“You know we don’t’ know what the industry will look like in two or three years, but I can tell the way it has been trending. A couple of more years like this, it will be hard to find a fresh shrimp in Biloxi.”

Back at the docks Winfred Hutchinson is showing off his freshly caught shrimp. He says shrimpers are used to hard times.

“It’s just a bad season, it’s a hard time to be a shrimper. It’s always been a hard time to be a shrimper.”

Plus, he says he can’t go anywhere. He’s been doing this his whole life and wouldn’t know how to do anything else.