The North Carolina Senate has passed a ban on inshore shrimp trawling, drawing outrage from the local commercial seafood sector.
“Everything I've worked for my entire life would be erased in a week," local fisher John Silver told WTKR News.
First introduced in the North Carolina House of Representatives, the bill originally sought to establish a state-managed fishery for red snapper and other groundfish in state waters as a way to evade federal fishing restrictions. However, lawmakers in the North Carolina Senate amended the bill, adding a ban on inshore trawling within 1.5 miles of the coast.
Local conservation groups claim the measure is necessary to stop the environmental destruction caused by shrimp trawling near the shore.
“This is an emotional issue for many,” North Carolina Wildlife Federation (NCWF) CEO Tim Gestwicki said in a statement. “But, the facts are clear. Large-scale, inshore bottom shrimp trawling kills hundreds of millions of juvenile fish and destroys vital seafloor habitats each year.”
The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission (NCWRC) has also come out in support of the legislation, sending out an email to 1.5 million North Carolina license holders to explain why inshore trawling needs to be banned, even though the shrimp fishery is sustainable in isolation.
“The current levels of harvest are not negatively impacting the numbers of shrimp in the state’s waters, and if that were the only impact of shrimp trawling, we would not be talking about House Bill 442, which was modified to prohibit shrimp trawling in the inshore waters of the state and passed by the NC Senate,” the commission said. “Unfortunately, shrimp trawling does not only affect the shrimp that are targeted. Trawling in estuaries can damage submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) beds and other bottom habitats that fish, especially juvenile fish, depend upon.”
According to NCWRC, North Carolina is the only U.S. state along the East Coast or the Gulf Coast that still allows widescale trawling in inshore waters.
To help compensate shrimpers ...
