Catching shrimp in Sinaloa, the country's cradle of fish production, is becoming more expensive. Offshore fishermen in the town of Topolobampo have seen it more intensely over the past two seasons: fuel accounts for up to half of their expenses, sizes have ceased to be competitive in the market and poaching is becoming more common.
For the start of the shrimp season, on October 17, almost 40% of the offshore fleet stayed at the pier due to lack of resources to pay for the departure. “In terms of prices and costs, this was a horrible season, small sizes continued to prevail and that did affect us tremendously in production,” Carlos Sotelo Monge, president of the Topolobampo Fishing Cooperatives Union, says in an interview.
Mexico, the country that once set the price trend in the major importer of shrimp that is the United States, ceases to be a strong competitor in the face of global production. This permeates the economy of coastal and industrial fishermen who allocate up to 60% of shrimp for export.
When it comes to causes, Sinaloa's fishermen agree on a multifactor. They talk about overfishing, climate change, the lack of support for the sector, the lack of budget for the National Fisheries and Aquaculture Commission (Conapesca) and, without a doubt, illegal fishing that does not end up in the seas, when boats catch during closed seasons, but extends to the international market.
“Poaching competes with fishing cooperatives because it floods the market... It means that when our product arrives there (the United States), the market is already supplied. This causes prices to become depressed, to fall, and it is increasingly difficult for us to continue to sustain them,” Sotelo explains.
A fall
Shrimp is one of the strongest fisheries in Mexico. This is the third fish species with the highest production volume in the country, ranking historically among the top three producers in Latin America, generating more than 37,000 jobs and contributing more than 100,000 tons to the agri-food sector, according to data from Conapesca.
Unlike other fisheries, shrimp have been resistant to overexploitation. However, it is not immune and every year there is a decline in the country's production. While in 2021 the sector reached 36,438 tons of liveweight, by 2022 it was 26,400 tons; and in 2023, 23,295 tons, according to figures from the Statistical Yearbook of Aquaculture and Fisheries.
The state of the wild shrimp fishery, mainly brown and blue shrimp, is reflected in the sizes, which are the basic measure for the commercialization of seafood, referring to the shrimp that exist per pound.
One of the objectives of catches during the closed season, carried out by poachers, is to be able to extract the largest specimens. At the start of the catch season, regulated anglers struggle to find competitive sizes because they were looted before.
“We see how production has decreased and we consider that it is due to poaching, but we have no doubt that it is also due to climate change that there has been less presence of shrimp,” says Alfonso Chaparro, president of the 21st Century Federation of Fishing Cooperatives, part of the coastal sector in Sinaloa.
Another factor that wreaks havoc on shrimp is the rise of aquaculture. Thirty years ago, sizes of wild shrimp sold for over ten dollars, today they are barely half as high and with increasing production costs. An example is the size 16/20 of wild shrimp, which has also been reached by farmed shrimp, raised on aquaculture farms.
In a review of shrimp imports to the United States, Causa Natura Media found that while in 2019 Mexico exported 29,552 tons of shrimp in different presentations, by 2024 they barely reached 12,337 tons. This represents a 58.2% drop in Mexican shrimp exports to the neighboring country.
By disaggregating the fall of Mexican shrimp, it can be identified that wild shrimp has been the real one affected, since farmed shrimp has had the highest inflow since 2022.
Mexico currently ranks seventh among shrimp importing countries in the United States, behind other Latin American countries such as Ecuador and Argentina, according to the country's National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA Fisheries).
“Shrimp from Ecuador goes to the United States and has come to share very strongly with prices because we must recognize that it is a country that is industrialized and has good quality, but it also fattles with very low prices due to the low cost of diesel, since (Ecuadorian fishermen) have an important subsidy for this. This has come to hit coastal (Mexican) fishing very hard,” explains Chaparro.
With a fishing permit
During the interviews, the fishermen agree that there are stories about the way in which the illegal product moves through the market. For Mexican shrimp farmers on the southern border of Mexico, it is known that import permits for a quantity of tons are used to bring in more than the document dictates.
A similar case occurs on the border between Mexico and the United States, where fishermen from northwestern Mexico talk about transporting shrimp under permits for another fishing product.
“Now, who is doing this illegal fishing? When you read reports from national and international organizations that have touched on the subject, it seems to be a group of people, almost like a flotilla of pirates that go from port to port looting, but the truth is that this is not the case. All these illegal practices within the regulatory framework are carried out by the same fishermen who have or do not have a permit,” Manuel Caudillo, director of Responsible Fishing and Fair Trade, explains during an interview.
The same is true in the market, Caudillo points out. For the fish product resulting from illegal capture to reach other countries, “it enters through the use of documents of legal origin issued and endorsed by the fishing authority”.
The arrival notice and the fishing guide are part of the documentation that is requested to report the capture and transport of fish products. Once a producer or possessor has this documentation, the origin becomes less important and the product is considered legal.
“There are regulations, we have traceability and all those things: where did you catch it, what is your arrival notice. There's a range of this, isn't there? ... There are regulations so that it doesn't happen, but it's happening and we don't understand how,” says Sotelo.
For the shrimp farmers
With the current tariff measures of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, and an increasingly competitive market, Mexican shrimp farmers are uncertain about their future with their main buyer.
For Mexican fishermen, there needs to be government support to fill the deficiencies. The fishing sector has repeatedly urged that subsidies be provided, mainly for fuel and engines, as was the case in the past.
“With a quarter of the production costs in fuel returned by the government to the sector with productive projects, with fleet reconstruction programs, because we have a fleet that has already exceeded its useful life twice, with social security, with good hospitals, with medicines for our people... it would contribute to a forgotten sector such as fishing and that is the way we could fly again,” says Sotelo.
The shrimp catch season ends on April 6, and the biggest impact has been on production costs. “With so much poaching and with so much free fishing population, it became extreme to be able to cope with the dynamics of getting ahead in taxes, social security, arbitration, payment of permits, payment of all the regulations that this activity entails,” says Sotelo.
With regard to illegal fishing, the common response in the sector is to increase inspection and surveillance, as well as to implement fishing traceability that allows the product to be recorded from its capture in the sea until it reaches final consumers. However, Caudillo points out that to solve the problem, it is necessary to understand the causes.
“Inspection and surveillance or stronger sanctions are not going to solve the problem. There are other illegal activities that, no matter how many penalties they may have, continue to exist and are still being practiced. In the case of fishing, which is an exploitation of the country's natural capital for socio-economic development, we should reflect on why we came here and how it could be reversed. If we need inspection, what is it for? Are you going to fill the jails with fishermen who were fishing to feed their family or to try to maintain their business? Are you going to confiscate the engine or the panga? Are you going to continue to impoverish them?” , questions Caudillo.
*This report belongs to series #ExportacionesPerdidas, a special investigation by Causa Natura Media on the effects of illegal fishing on export species.
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