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 for lost business from the ban, the senate has passed legislation establishing a transitional payment program providing financial relief to commercial fishing license holders who were trawling between 1 January 2023 and 30 June 2025. The program would authorize payments through October 2028.
The ban drew immediate opposition from North Carolina’s coastal communities, with the Currituck County and Onslow County governments writing letters expressing their disapproval.
“Currituck County is a coastal county that relies heavily on the commercial fishing industry to provide jobs and promote local spending. The industry contributes significantly to the health of our economy while also providing our hardworking local watermen with a means to financially support their businesses and their families,” the Currituck County Board of Commissioners wrote in a letter to state lawmakers. “Imposing this restriction on shrimp trawling not only threatens the livelihoods of our local watermen but has the potential to threaten the entire commercial seafood industry, potentially resulting in devastating economic impacts that will be felt by Currituck County and our coastal neighbors, all of whom have long advocated for and supported a thriving seafood industry as a main economic driver for communities along the North Carolina coast.”
Opponents of the bill claim that many of the vessels that currently trawl inshore are unsuited to operate a 1.5 miles offshore, where trawling would still be permitted.
“If we go over [0.5 miles] ashore, we’ll destroy all of our nets. The people passing this know this,” Southern Breeze Seafood John Mallette told The Carolina Journal. “The bill is fine before you added the shrimp to it. This is really going to be devastating, and then there’s a reason why they did this in the 23rd hour at the last second.”
The North Carolina legislation comes shortly after the Southern Shrimp Alliance (SSA) and Houston, Texas, U.S.A.-based SeaD Consulting announced that genetic testing revealed 77 percent of seafood restaurants tested in Wilmington, North Carolina, served imported shrimp despite misleading their customers into thinking the shrimp was a domestic product. The two groups have conducted genetic testing at restaurants in several states in the Southern U.S. to highlight how frequently restaurants are selling imported products as locally sourced shrimp.
In a letter to North Carolina lawmakers, SSA Executive Director John Williams said a ban would only compound the struggles of shrimpers in the state.
“As is painfully well understood throughout the coastal fishing communities in North Carolina and in the other seven shrimp-producing states from Texas to South Carolina, the American shrimp industry is in a state of economic collapse,” Williams said. “This tragic collapse, costing so many multigenerational, family-owned small businesses and jobs that are at the core of the economies and cultures of those communities is the consequence of failed U.S. trade policies that have enabled cheap, unfairly traded, and often illegally produced shrimp imports to overwhelm the U.S. shrimp market.”
The amended legislation still needs to be passed by the North Carolina House to become law.
