An American shrimper in the Gulf and a corn farmer in Iowa lived in two entirely different bureaucratic worlds for the majority of the previous fifty years. The farmer had contracts for school lunches, marketing grants, crop insurance, disaster loans, and a comprehensive list of USDA programs intended to sustain the business in the face of unfavorable weather and markets. The shrimper had a Department of Commerce phone number, a boat, and a bill for diesel. Coastal economies have been shaped by that disparity in ways that most Americans have never had to consider. Washington attempted to close it this week.
The usual cast of senators and cabinet secretaries stood at podiums to make the announcement, but the content was different. Together with Doug Burgum of Interior and Howard Lutnick of Commerce, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins unveiled the first federal office of its kind, the USDA Office of Seafood, which was created expressly to integrate fishermen into the kind of support system that American farmers have taken for granted since the New Deal. Listening to the language used gives the impression that the individuals involved are aware that what they are doing is important. It’s another matter entirely whether it can support that weight.
It’s difficult to ignore the timing. The Magnuson-Stevens Act, which essentially created the modern American fishing industry, was signed fifty years ago this week. For the majority of those fifty years, fishermen complained that they were not considered a food industry but rather a regulatory issue, frequently, loudly, and to anyone in Washington who would sit still. You’ll hear it within ten minutes if you stroll along a working dock in Bayou La Batre or New Bedford. At dawn, the catch is released. The truckload of paperwork arrives. Additionally, row crops were nearly always included in the federal programs that could have mitigated a difficult season.
Fishermen deserve what farmers receive, according to Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska, who has been advocating for this position for more than ten years. It was long overdue, according to Maine Senator Susan Collins. The phrase “landmark” was used by the Southern Shrimp Alliance, which has been quietly advocating for this for years. Although they don’t always mean it, industry groups rarely use that word carelessly.
On paper, the office’s actual operations seem technocratic. It facilitates coordination between USDA agencies. It provides access to initiatives such as the Value Added Producer Grant, Rural Development loans, export programs of the Foreign Agricultural Service, and USDA procurement contracts—the multibillion-dollar pipeline that supplies food banks and school cafeterias annually. Southeast Asian imports are replaced with American shrimp in school lunches. That’s the kind of slow, bureaucratic change that alters supply chains but doesn’t make headlines.
Many things remain unclear. Since a hurricane is not a hailstorm and a red tide is not a drought, there is currently no crop insurance for shrimp, and writing such a policy is extremely difficult. Aquaculture is not the same as wild-capture operations, and the loan programs that are being made available are more accommodating to the latter. Currently, the Office of Seafood serves as a coordinating body rather than a checkbook. The ability of those in charge to incorporate seafood into programs that were not designed with it in mind will determine its true impact.
Nevertheless, there’s a sense that something has changed as you watch this play out. It is supported by a political coalition that includes Democrats like Ossoff and Republicans like Cammack and Kennedy from Maine to Alaska to the Gulf. That is uncommon. It implies that those closest to the water finally persuaded Washington to listen to what they have been saying for a long time: the men and women who catch America’s seafood are also farmers in every significant sense. The question that remains to be answered is whether the rest of the federal government adopts that concept.
