| On Thursday, the Fishery Monitoring Branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries’ Southeast Fisheries Science Center released preliminary shrimp landings data from the Gulf of Mexico and the South Atlantic for December 2022. As with the agency’s reporting since July of last year, the numbers released by NOAA include substantial revisions, with reporting for the years prior to 2022 reflecting final totals tabulated by the agency. Because NOAA’s reporting for December 2022 remains preliminary in nature, the Southern Shrimp Alliance presents these data in the historical context of the agency’s previously reported preliminary figures. This means that in the summary charts prepared by the Southern Shrimp Alliance, the historical figures for the month of December in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 do not correspond to the numbers now being reported by NOAA. The preliminary data indicates that roughly 6.7 million pounds of shrimp were landed in the Gulf and South Atlantic in December 2022. For the full year, a total of nearly 119.7 million pounds of warmwater shrimp have been reported as landed in the United States, down from NOAA’s revised and updated figure of 128.0 million pounds for 2021, a decline of 6.5 percent, and down from NOAA’s revised and updated figure of 122.9 million pounds for 2020, a declined of 2.7 percent. Compared to the preliminary figures previously reported by the agency, U.S. warmwater shrimp landings in the Gulf of Mexico were 7.1 percent below the prior twenty-two year historic average of 117.9 million pounds. Once again, the data released by NOAA shows that while shrimp landings in Texas significantly declined in 2022 (and were well below totals reported over the prior four years) at 33.7 million pounds of landed shrimp, Louisiana had a bounce-back year with 51.7 million pounds of shrimp landed last year. Last year, Louisiana accounted for 43.2 percent of the total volume of warmwater shrimp landed in the entire United States. This is a considerable increase from the previous two years (2019 and 2020), when Louisiana accounted for roughly 37.0 percent of total warmwater shrimp landings in the United States. NOAA has revised its reporting of ex-vessel prices, such that the agency no longer reports ex-vessel prices for three different areas of the Gulf of Mexico (Western, Northern, and Eastern). Instead, NOAA now reports a single ex-vessel price for the entirety of Gulf of Mexico and, separately, a single ex-vessel price for the South Atlantic. As the result of the simplification of NOAA’s reporting, the Southern Shrimp Alliance now tracks and summarizes prices for all count sizes used by the agency (U15, 15/20, 21/25, 26/30, 31/35, 36/40, and 41/50). A review of the ex-vessel pricing data from NOAA indicates that in the Gulf of Mexico, ex-vessel prices for all count sizes were reported to have been lower in December 2022 than in December 2021. Similarly, with the exception of 41/50 count-size shrimp, all ex-vessel prices reported for the South Atlantic in December 2022 were significantly below those reported in December 2021. Please click the following link to view the Southern Shrimp Alliance’s compilation and summary of December 2000-2022 shrimp landings in the Gulf of Mexico, December 2018-2022 shrimp landings in the South Atlantic, and ex-vessel prices in the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic for December 2018-2022: https://www.shrimpalliance.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/December-2022-Landings.pdf |
First Quarter Report
April 17, 2024