With little more than a week remaining in this year’s meeting of the Georgia General Assembly, a bill to help protect the livelihoods of Coastal Georgia shrimpers from the deluge of imported foreign shrimp has run into uncertain waters.
The culprit, says Coastal Georgia shrimp advocate John Wallace, is the restaurant industry.
The measure, introduced in January by Rep. Jesse Petrea (R-Savannah) and co-sponsored by Al Williams (D-Midway), Rick Townsend (R-Brunswick), Buddy DeLoach (R-Townsend), and Lehman Franklin (R-Statesboro), would require restaurants and other food service establishments to inform customers of the origin of their shrimp and other seafood.
The state House passed HB 117 in mid-February by a whopping 165-7 vote after a minor tweak. The bill language that passed would require restaurants in the state to disclose to customers that they serve “foreign imported” shrimp in menus or on a sign. A recent survey of Chatham County restaurants showed that a preponderance of those serving shrimp were selling foreign, not wild-caught U.S. crustaceans, and misleading customers about it. [Read more about the DNA testing of local restaurant shrimp here.]
The bill, however, ran into rocky shoals in the Senate Committee on Interstate Cooperation when it took up the measure a week later. This is a requisite step before going to the Rules Committee and then a full vote of the Senate.
Petrea testified at that committee that in all his years in the legislature, he had never sponsored a bill that has had such an outpouring of support.
Yet 20 minutes into the hearing, with the panel’s five members preparing to vote, committee chairman Sen. Colton Moore (R-Trenton) proposed an amendment to the bill. That language would require restaurants to write on their menus when they served imported chicken and beef, as well as imported shrimp and seafood.
Moore didn’t explain the reasons for proposed changes. Without debate or discussion, the committee then passed the bill as amended.
To Wallace, who runs Anchored Shrimp in Brunswick and is a board member of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, the new language was intended to sideline the bill that the restaurant industry views as threatening to their members’ bottom lines.
“It was a tactic to kill it,” Wallace said. “The legislative body is concerned and would like to do something. But the restaurant industry lobby is much stronger than the shrimp industry.”
At the time, Petrea and Sen. Ben Watson (R-Savannah), who is shepherding the Petrea’s bill through his chamber, said nothing about Moore’s revisions.
Petrea said Monday that he’s still “hopeful” his original, “shrimp-only” measure will pass the Senate and be signed into law. He told The Current that he expects the Rules Committee to consider a “shrimp-only” measure this week and push it to the Senate floor for a vote before the legislature adjourns on April 4.
A wary Wallace said that the restaurant industry killed a similar bill in the mid-2000s, when the Georgia shrimping industry was healthier and stronger than it is now.
Georgia’s shrimping industry has been in a tailspin for nearly two decades as local shrimpers and distributors have not been able to compete with a flood of imports from places like Thailand, India and Ecuador, which use forced labor and antibiotics to farm shrimp at submarket costs.
“The profit margins are not there that used to be there because imports have collapsed the marketplace,” Wallace said. “This should have been an easy win” for local shrimping businesses and consumers.
Read more of The Current’s in-depth coverage here.
