_Under a gray morning sky, two shrimp boats maneuvered toward one another. On their respective bows, the festival king and queen tried to steady themselves, each extending a champagne glass toward the other in a toast. The procession between two bridges on the Atchafalaya River marked the eighty-eighth “blessing of the fleet,” a ritual of strained choreography in Morgan City, Louisiana, at the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival.

Fleet blessings are held to pray for a bountiful harvest and safe return. In years past, dozens of boats would arrive at the state’s oldest industrial festival for this sacred rite. Renditions of it have found their way into popular culture through travelogues, magazines, and even Mike Tidwell’s bestseller, Bayou Farewell, which documented Louisiana’s coastal crisis to a national audience.

Natalie Sloane, this year’s festival queen, stood a head taller than her counterpart Dan Conrad, a local shipyard executive. Earlier, the voice of a gospel singer had crackled over a loudspeaker as Sloane, a freshman at nearby Nicholls State University, boarded the shrimp trawler Mama D, which pushed off with its nets extended like butterfly wings. A court of ladies-in-waiting loaded onto a tug that took its place between the two boats—a liminal spot between industries adrift in changing tides.

Long gone are the days when Morgan City’s shrimp fleet lined up four-boats-deep along the Atchafalaya River waterfront. “This is the smallest I’ve seen it,” said Jennifer Barras, who grew up watching the blessing. “In the past, there were shrimp boats, and quite a few big oil boats and cargo boats. They don’t have that anymore.”

Louisiana’s shrimp industry, once a powerhouse, has been decimated by imports, while oil production in the Gulf of Mexico has struggled to rebound from its post-COVID slump with a fraction of its previous workforce. This year’s “fleet” consisted of only six boats—two shrimp boats, the tugboat, and three small motorboats—that passed under the dockside arm of Father Patrick Riviere, who flicked holy water over their bows.

Morgan City is a microcosm of the unraveling fabric of Louisiana’s industrial culture. The town of about 11,000 is on a low-lying patch of marsh called Tiger Island, which sits three feet above sea level surrounded by a ring levee at the mouth of the largest swamp drainage basin in the United States. The town held the first blessing of the fleet in 1937, a year after it inaugurated what was then simply called the Shrimp Festival. In 1967, “Petroleum” was added to the name to reflect the city’s ascendant industry of wealth and opportunity.

“This used to be a party,” said Pat McElroy, a native of Berwick, Louisiana, across the river from Morgan City, who recalled getting up at 7 a.m. to board a boat in the parade with his dad. “In the late ’70s, this was booming. They spared no expense.”

Morgan City’s once bustling shipyards have moved off to Port Fourchon, the sprawling oil and gas service yard near Grand Isle, Louisiana, that serves deep-sea rigs. Oil and gas headquarters have consolidated to Houston. And global warming and sea level rise are bleaching reefs and drowning Louisiana’s coastal estuaries, which provide critical nurseries for juvenile shrimp and other fish.

While most outsiders are quick to note the disconnect between a natural, edible commodity like shrimp and the environmentally hazardous petroleum industry, the people of South Louisiana seem to flow between the two. In years past, when the shrimping business was down, shrimpers and deck hands turned to the oil business for seasonal work, which bolstered the idea that shrimp and petroleum were members of the same clan. It’s hard to find much criticism of the oil and gas industry among working-class communities in Louisiana—mainly because it has been a breadwinner for so long. It’s normal to have family members who work either in fishing, oil, or both.

A local shrimper docked at Morgan City for the festival said that a national reporter recently came asking about tensions between fishers and the oil industry. “We said we don’t have a problem with them. Occasionally, a trawling net will catch on a pipeline or submerged wellhead. She pulled up the nautical map on the dashboard of her boat showing a web of pipelines within their fishing grounds. “We just know where to avoid them.”

_Behind a large seawall that protects Morgan City’s downtown from periodic floods on the Atchafalaya, the annual festival was in full swing. Just past the VIP Petro Pit, live music from the Petroleum Heritage Music Stage filled the centrally located Lawrence Park with zydeco, country music, and classic Americana tunes. Two blocks away, festivalgoers milled about in the shade under the elevated U.S. Highway 90 bridge, where carnival rides, games, and vendors were set up. Food booths advertised fried shrimp on a stick, bang bang shrimp, catfish, and oysters, along with the typical fare of nachos, corn dogs, and fried Oreos.

As the Mama D returned to dock, its painted sign advertising SHRIMP FOR SALE hinted at one of the festival’s grim realities: Today, shrimpers often have to sell directly to retail customers to make ends meet. A surge of imports has flooded the shrimp market and made it impossible for them to make a living wholesale.

“It’s hard,” said Ashley Turner, who helps her father, Donald Ribardi, sell shrimp from the Mama D. “We have good customers, but I see a lot of people struggling.”

For shrimpers, it has been a tough year in a tough decade. “It’s about the worst it’s ever been,” said Rex Caffey, a Louisiana State University (LSU) researcher who works with fishers through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Sea Grant partnership. “The past year has been very, very bad.” Commercial shrimpers in Louisiana have plunged from 6,900 in 2000 to just 1,600 today. Federally licensed fishers in the Gulf have also plummeted from 4,585 vessels in 1981 to 1,467 in 2023, according to NOAA.

A whopping ninety-five percent of all the shrimp eaten by Americans is imported—most of it pond-raised in India, Ecuador, Indonesia, and Vietnam. From 2019 to 2021, immediately following COVID shutdowns, shrimp imports to the United States ballooned by twenty-eight percent. In 2023, imported shrimp totaled more than 1.7 billion pounds. Louisiana shrimpers, by comparison, landed only seventy million pounds in 2023.

When prices drop on imports, domestic prices drop in order to compete, said Peyton Cagle, a shrimp specialist with Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries. Even in the brief period since COVID shutdowns, wholesale prices for shrimp have fallen by half, to about eighty cents per pound; too little to cover diesel, labor, and maintenance. “I used to buy from 1,500 boats,” said Dean Blanchard, owner of Dean Blanchard Seafood in Grand Isle, Louisiana. “Now I buy from twenty.”

Direct sales to retail customers can fetch two to four dollars a pound, but moving retail volume takes time. Shrimpers have to limit how much they can hold per trip. “We can’t sell them fast enough before they go bad,” said the shrimper in Morgan City, who wished to remain anonymous. Other shrimpers have faced retributive action from docks for speaking out, costing them their access to dockside sales. Her own boating operation struggles to pencil out.

Most imported shrimp comes already processed, either peeled or breaded and frozen, which has also taken local processors out of the market. At the industry’s peak in the 1970s, Louisiana counted forty to fifty processors. They bought, peeled, packed, and stored shrimp, said Julie Falgout with Sea Grant. Falgout grew up in Houma, then married into a shrimping family in the bayou community of Dulac, on a spit of marshland at the end of Bayou Terrebonne. “We’re down to six or seven processors in Louisiana,” she said. “Just in Dulac alone, where we kept our boats, we had eleven processors. We now have one. Our last peeler in Dulac closed in December. That’s just one bayou.” The same scene is being repeated across the Gulf, as processors close and shrimpers put their boats up for sale. “It’s pretty depressing,” she said.

The situation has also strained relations between shrimpers and buyers who refuse to pay premium prices for wild shrimp. Local fishermen say foreign sellers don’t abide by the same regulations as domestic ones, which creates more environmental hazards worldwide. Not all nations, for instance, operate with turtle excluder devices as required by U.S. law, according to the Southern Shrimp Alliance. “We’ve never caught a turtle,” said the anonymous shrimper in Morgan City, “and [the excluder] takes a third of our catch.”

Foreign shrimp producers have also faced backlash for their work practices. In March 2024, a searing report emerged from the Associated Press, Corporate Accountability Lab, and the Outlaw Ocean Project documenting horrific labor conditions in India’s shrimp industry, including forced labor and child labor, hazardous working conditions, low wages and withheld pay, forced and unpaid overtime, and abuse. Imported shrimp from India to the U.S. reached 650 million pounds valued at $2.3 billion in 2023, which was forty percent of all shrimp imports.

Restaurants often sell this imported shrimp packaged with Cajun iconography. At a meeting of the Louisiana Shrimp Task Force last summer in Houma, several shrimpers and dock buyers complained that restaurants were selling imported shrimp unbeknownst to customers and undermining Louisiana shrimpers. “They’re cheating,” Rocky Ditcharo, a shrimp processor from the downriver parish of Plaquemines, told the Task Force, which was created by legislative statute to advise the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

In 2024, the Louisiana legislature passed a law requiring restaurants to label imported seafood, specifically shrimp and crawfish. Businesses who violate the rules could face fines up to $2,000. “We can’t mess around with that,” said Mike T., a cashier at New Orleans’s Parkway Bakery, which stakes a claim as one of the originators of the po’boy sandwich. Founded in 1911, the family-owned restaurant is splashed with vintage photos and old newspaper clippings about the iconic 1929 streetcar strike where French bread sandwiches of fried potatoes and gravy were prepared to feed those “poor boys.” Today, locals and tourists line up out the door to order. Parkway advertises WILD CAUGHT GULF SHRIMP at the top of its menu.

“We’ve got the best shrimp in the world right here in your backyard,” said chef Justin Kennedy, who is also general manager. “Why would you buy from someplace else?” The fried shrimp po’boy comes wrapped in white butcher paper with extra flash-fried shrimp spilling out, crispy and hot. “Is it more expensive? Yes, sometimes it is,” Kennedy said. “My customers are going to pay pretty much whatever it’s going to be. In good times and bad times. They end up paying it.” Kennedy said state health inspectors have stepped up enforcement to ensure that advertised wild-caught shrimp are actually wild caught. While we were talking, a health department inspector made a surprise inspection of his walk-in freezer. Kennedy said Parkway buys about a thousand pounds of shrimp a week from about three local suppliers. “They’re tagged all the way down to the shrimp boat.”

I was curious if the booths at the Morgan City Festival, set up feet away from boats like the Mama D, were as intentional in their sourcing. My informal survey of vendors revealed that much of the shrimp for sale originated from other waters. Of the five vendors I spoke with, only one, which was selling head-on boiled shrimp, could identify their source: Biloxi Shrimp Co., which buys wild-caught shrimp from fishermen.

Other vendors vaguely reported that their shrimp were from “the Gulf” or Louisiana. The server from Tin-Tin’s Oriental Food and Imports based out of Pensacola, Florida, said she bought from her restaurant supplier but didn’t know where it was from.

My suspicions were further verified by a report that surfaced a month later. Genetic testing by SeaD Consulting, a food safety tech company, found that four out of five vendors at the festival were selling imported shrimp.

The anonymous shrimper in Morgan City seemed unsurprised by the revelation. “They all buy from Sysco,” she said. “They come deveined and processed. Nobody wants to hire someone to do that now.”

In 2020, researchers at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette cited foreign imports as one of several stressors on the state’s seafood industry, which at the time generated an estimated $2.4 billion economic impact.

Among struggling domestic shrimpers, shrimp from international producers is often the target of vitriol and fear mongering. “It’s garbage,” said wholesaler Dean Blanchard, whose South Louisiana Cajun accent lands flat on consonants and curls around his vowels. “You wouldn’t drink out of a water fountain in India—but you would eat the food that lives in it?” Blanchard gained notoriety on YouTube for a quip at a legislative committee meeting about taking antibiotic-infused Indian shrimp for his cold. “My wife bought Thibodeaux’s wild-caught crawfish,” he told me. “The first bite I ate out the pot, I said, ‘That ain’t Louisiana.’”

_“Out in California, they think we’re idiots. But to us this is normal,” said Virgil Allen, an oil rig safety specialist. Allen now manages “Mr. Charlie,” a former oil rig that now serves as the Morgan City oil museum and training facility. Just across the train tracks from downtown, Mr. Charlie’s jacked legs loom over the river surface. Its rusted walkways and tight sleeping quarters are now used to simulate conditions for candidate employees, who live on the rig as if at sea.

Even before “Petroleum” was added to the title of Morgan City’s annual festival, oil came to dominate Louisiana politics. In 1929, charismatic governor Huey Long was impeached by the state House of Representatives for attempting to pass a barrel tax on “The Standard.” Oil also juiced the state’s economy. At one point, in the late 1970s, oil and gas severance taxes accounted for half of the state budget.

Morgan City was at the heart of the industry, hosting Texaco, Gulf, and Mobil operations. Mr. Charlie, built in New Orleans for use just off shore of Morgan City, was the world’s first portable rig. The town’s DNA can also be found on unmanned submersible vehicles used today in oil fields around the world, said Bryce Merrill, a former oil diver who gives tours of Mr. Charlie. International names like Oceaneering and Tidewater were started here.

But Morgan City’s industrial innovation seeded the town’s own demise. With the advent of portable rigs, oil companies could literally take their rigs and go play in someone else’s oil field, ditching Louisiana’s workforce of roustabouts and roughnecks. Modern rigs are technically vessels, held afloat by thrusters on each leg, captained by a skipper and a regiment of computer operators. They’re able to drill below the seabed to depths measured in tens of thousands of feet.

By the time Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005, most of the action had moved offshore, beyond the reach of platforms like Mr. Charlie. Jobs in Louisiana’s oil patch have been disappearing for two decades. The Louisiana Department of Energy and Natural Resources’ latest figures, from 2024, show that the oil and gas workforce has fallen by nearly half since 2001. In the last ten years, 20,000 oil and gas workers have received pink slips, according to True Transition, a nonprofit that carried out a survey of oil and gas workers in 2022. They found that forty-four percent of Louisiana-based respondents had been laid off at least once prior to 2020, and fifteen percent were laid off more than once. COVID shocks also sent workers home. Employers fired 12,256 oil and gas workers between March 1, 2020, and November 15, 2021. Since then, only a small fraction have been rehired, according to True Transition’s Megan Milliken Biven.

Yet oil production has never been higher. The U.S. oil industry surpassed its 2019 record production in 2023, and in 2024 produced over thirteen million barrels of oil per day. So what gives? Industry advocates say the Biden administration slow-walked new lease sales, which are the beachheads for job creation. In 2021, President Biden tried to halt new oil and gas leases on public lands and waters, aiming to reduce carbon emissions, but was ordered by a Louisiana federal judge to reopen them. Still, the administration let the 2017–2022 lease plan lapse without a replacement. “That is the first time that ever happened,” said Keith Hall, a lease attorney and professor at LSU. Last year also marked the first year without an offshore oil and gas lease sale since 1958, and there are only three sales scheduled for the next five years, said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA), in an emailed statement. “It’s unprecedented,” he said.

So why are lease sales important if oil companies are producing record volumes? Advocates say new leases drive companies to hire in order to assess, acquire, and eventually drill new lease blocks. If 2024 oil production in the Gulf of Mexico was high, it had more to do with exploiting known reserves than increasing production opportunities.

Louisiana’s average rig count, which measures active drilling, was forty-three rigs in 2024—considerably fewer drillers than the 190 rigs in 2010, just before the BP oil spill. In 2001, the state averaged 200 rigs, according to industry equipment manufacturers Baker Hughes. With fewer rigs in the Gulf to drill for new wells, it appears that production facilities are pulling out more oil from existing wells, said Allen, the safety specialist. “If you can get more out of the spigot, you’re going to do it,” he said. “That’s not necessarily a good thing.”

Normally, majors like ExxonMobil and Shell will tap a reservoir for a limited time before selling their fields to mid-level companies to free up capital to exploit new areas. In August 2024, for example, ExxonMobil announced it was listing $1 billion in assets in the Permian Basin toward more exploration. Eventually, those mid-level companies will sell to smaller operators, and on down the food chain. Without that cycle, local oil operations, like those in Morgan City, dry up with their wells. Louisiana counts more than 4,700 orphaned wells—those with no viable owner—and more than 26,000 idled wells that are effectively abandoned, according to the Louisiana Department of Energy and Natural Resources.

Today, oil severance taxes account for less than five percent of the state budget.

“The money dried up,” said Pat McElroy, “and everybody moved away.”

_Here’s the naked truth: shrimp and petroleum can never really be friends. While slowing lease sales might be unprecedented, the Earth’s climbing temperatures are more alarming. Rising air and water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, where much of the nation’s oil and gas is produced, are well outpacing global averages—exacerbated by a loop current that draws hot water up from the Caribbean in a clockwise current around the Gulf’s northern edge.

Critical estuaries for juvenile fisheries are being lost to sea-level rise, which threatens future fish stocks. Changes to one species have knock-on effects to others, said Patrick Banks, fisheries management division administrator for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. “Water temperatures play a huge role in the life history of many of these fishery species that we manage,” Banks said at a panel hosted by the department in 2022. In 2023, Wildlife and Fisheries proposed reducing the bag limits of redfish and speckled trout due to decreased biomass of fish stocks.

Louisiana’s vast web of pipelines, oil fields, and offshore platforms has carved up the coastal marsh with pipeline canals and chronic discharges and spills. Still the nation’s largest, the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill continues to impact life in the Gulf. Totaling nearly five million barrels of oil over eighty-seven days, its slick covered more than 68,000 square miles. An estimated 1,100 miles of shoreline from Louisiana to Florida was polluted. Some of the oil was removed or treated by cleanup crews. Some of it degraded naturally. Much of it soaked into the soil. A third of the spill is still unaccounted for. Some scientists think it must have sunk to the ocean bottom, where it continues to harm aquatic life. A decade later, researchers were still finding high levels of soil contamination. The National Wildlife Federation reported that nearly 8.3 billion oysters were poisoned by the spill. Dolphin mortality doubled. And tens of thousands of sea turtles and seabirds died.

Unlike aquatic species and fin fish, shrimp return year after year. They are considered to be an “annual crop” because their entire lifecycle is eighteen months. They are also migratory. They swim around the oil spills and hypoxia zones, said Peyton Cagle, who in his role with Wildlife and Fisheries helps determine the length of shrimping season based on the size of juveniles caught during test trawls.

What shrimp cannot avoid, however, is the destruction of the marsh itself. An adult shrimp will spawn up to one million eggs that float into Louisiana’s estuary, where juveniles develop. “From my perspective, the continued loss of our wetlands is the biggest threat to the future existence of our way of life,” said Corey Miller with the Pontchartrain Conservancy.

As the marsh disappears in bits and pieces, it creates a false signal of ecological health: more interior edges create temporary estuaries where shrimp, along with redfish and speckled trout, like to hang out. Miller likens this to a bag of ice melting. Compared with a block of ice, which only melts from the outside, the smaller pieces in a bag of ice create many melting points within the whole. It’s an unfortunate lag effect, where much more habitat will disappear before fisheries really start to drop off, said Caffey, the Sea Grant researcher. People are harvesting oysters and catching speckled trout and shrimp in areas that used to be filled with wetlands. Meanwhile, seawater creeps closer to coastal communities, which makes them vulnerable to storm surge.

Global temperature rise has likewise brought erratic storms and hurricanes, which disrupt the fishing communities themselves. As I was reporting this story, Hurricane Francine had formed overnight in the Gulf just above the Yucatán Peninsula and was trained on South Louisiana. Fisherman Barry Rogers was busy battening down his boat in Dulac and checking on his elderly father outside of Houma.

“As far as tomorrow goes, if you ain’t got your shit together by this afternoon you’re on your own,” Rogers said by phone the day before Francine grew into a hurricane. “But we’re well rehearsed for this down in South Louisiana.” Following a major hurricane, the biggest disruption to the fishing industry is the impact on the fishers, said Caffey. Damages to docks, ice houses, and buyers can take them out of action—particularly if the disruptions stretch into months, which happened in 2020 when four major hurricanes struck South Louisiana over a period of 367 days. Rogers planned to ride out this storm on his eighty-foot steel boat. “The house is not going nowhere. If it does, there’s nothing you can do about it,” he said. “If a rope breaks on the boat, I’d rather be there to tie another one.” Many of the commercial fishers can no longer afford insurance, so damages have ripple effects throughout the coastal communities, which have been losing population for years.

“When you see a shrimp boat, it’s not just a boat and a captain—that’s a family,” said Miller.

Shrimpers here talk about fishing as an intergenerational tradition passed down from parent to child. “I say it’s in the blood,” said Bruce Lodrigue, a shrimper in Morgan City who turned out for the festival. Lodrigue, who fished with his wife Deborah for thirty-five years, sees that connection disappearing in real time.

“If the daddy don’t show the son, who’s going to teach them?” asked the wholesaler Blanchard. “You can’t go to LSU to be a shrimper. You’re raised on that job.”

By the afternoon the early clouds had departed, and the festival queen and king led the annual parade around Lawrence Park. Young families with strollers meandered toward the shaded underpass for food and carnival rides. The revelation of foreign shrimp being sold at the festival has certainly given organizers a black eye. But it has also trained attention on a growing problem that, until recently, few Louisianans knew existed. “We need to think about what it is we value,” said Biven with True Transition. “Do we believe that it is an inherent public good to have a domestic seafood industry? Or do we just care about end prices and profit margins?”

This story appears in the Summer 2025 print edition as “Fraying Ties.” Order the Y’all Street Issue here.