NOAA recently released preliminary data on shrimp landings from the Gulf of Mexico and the South Atlantic for April 2023, with the data showing the price of shrimp continues to sit near historic lows.
Across the Gulf of Mexico – which is listed by landings from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Western Florida, and compiled monthly by the Southern Shrimp Alliance from NOAA data – most states saw increases shrimp catches sitting above historical averages. Overall landings across the state, however, were down thanks to a lack of data from Louisiana, which historically has averaged over 884,000 pounds, or roughly 401 metric tons (MT), of shrimp landed for the month.
The largest increase over historical average went to Mississippi, which caught 99,000 pounds (45 MT) of shrimp in April 2023, 220.6 percent above the historical average of 30,755 pounds (14 MT).
Alabama saw the second-largest bump in landings over the historical average, with the state harvesting 656,000 pounds (297.5 MT) in the month, 97.7 percent above the historical average of 331,614 pounds (150 MT). While the historical average represents an average of the catch since 2002, landings started to increase in 2015, and the only year post-2015 that the state landed shrimp close to the historical average is 2020, when it caught ...
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