Lowcountry shrimpers are in trouble.
It's a message local fishermen have spread with urgency in recent years: If not for intervention at the state and federal level, South Carolina's shrimping industry may soon be washed away in a storm of economic upheaval created in large part by the dumping of foreign shrimp into the U.S. market.
Solutions to that problem have proved difficult to navigate.
Several coastal communities thought they were on the right path late last year. By the end of 2023, four Lowcountry municipalities — Beaufort and Bluffton along with McClellanville and Mount Pleasant — sent letters urging Gov. Henry McMaster to declare an economic disaster due to imported shrimp dumping. Now, as we get deeper into 2024, the governor has yet to make that declaration.
The gesture by the municipalities was both a symbolic show of support and a genuine effort to enact change from state leaders. But, in reality, it is not within the governor's power to fulfill the requests because the economic disaster caused by shrimp dumping did not begin with a natural disaster.
Read more at The Post and Courier. Reporting by Jessica Wade.
