PORT ARTHUR, Texas — The Port Arthur Shrimper's Association held an informational meeting Wednesday to help stop shrimp dumping.
Shrimp dumping is the heavy importing of shrimp from other countries.
Shrimpers in Southeast Texas are also pushing to impose stricter tariffs on imported shrimp. They say regulating the amount and quality of shrimp coming in could save their livelihoods.
Two new federal bills could potentially benefit shrimpers and Southeast Texans.
Local shrimpers say they aren't making any money because U.S. businesses are buying imported shrimp at low prices.
Their fresh local shrimp, which costs more, isn't selling like it used to. They hope the new bills will help.
The Southern Shrimp Alliance helped take the two bills to the Capitol.
"Driving the price down so far, that we cannot make a profit to go shrimping," said Southern Shrimp Alliance Lawyer Nathaniel Rickard.
Rickard says imported shrimp from counties like China and Ecuador have caused an influx of shrimp.
"If you think about peeled shrimp coming into the United States those two countries account for about 80% of all the peeled shrimp that's in place," he said.
This causes a domino effect.
"So the new trade cases that are brought by the American Shrimp Processors Association are going towards the unfair trade practices that have allowed that shrimp to come in so inexpensively and has cut domestic shrimp prices," Rickard said.
One of the bills is the Laws Ensuring Safe Shrimp Act.
"And that there would be additional funding to the Food and Drug Administration to test imported shrimp for banned antibiotics," Rickard told 12News.
The other bill is the Resilient Communities Act. This takes funds from potential tariffs on imports and funnels the cash to local communities that could show they had some injury from trade.
This could then be given to members of the community, or projects that were intended to try to address that injury from trade.
"There's so much that's going on that the public doesn't know and local fisherman and others in this industry are trying to survive to be able to bring people a good product," said Port Arthur Shrimper's Association President Kyle Kimball.
Shrimpers told 12News that it will to be an uphill battle to pass the proposed bills into law.