Yesterday, 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 October 2022.
As with the agency’s reporting since July of last year, the numbers released by NOAA for landings in the Gulf in October include substantial revisions. These revisions have led to changes to reporting for prior years so that these figures now represent the actual, final shrimp landings data.
Because NOAA’s reporting for October 2022 remains preliminary in nature, the Southern Shrimp Alliance has continued to present 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 October in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 do not correspond to the numbers now being reported by NOAA.
The data released by NOAA did not include any information regarding shrimp landings in South Carolina for the month of September and no information has reported for shrimp landings in that state for any of 2022. However, NOAA’s release on Tuesday included preliminary data for all other states.
This preliminary data indicates that nearly 10.1 million pounds of shrimp were landed in the Gulf and South Atlantic in October 2022. For the first ten months of 2022, NOAA reports that 99.6 million pounds of warmwater shrimp were landed in the United States, slightly down from the 104.7 million pounds landed over the same time period in 2021 but slightly above the 97.2 million pounds landed in the first ten months of 2020.
A breakdown of the landings data by state shows that landings in Texas, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia were down compared to the previous year, but that landings in Louisiana have been the highest reported since at least 2019, at 43.3 million pounds. On its own, Louisiana accounts for roughly 47 percent of the shrimp reported by NOAA as landed in the Gulf of Mexico in 2022.
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, with the exception of 31/35 count, were reported to have been lower in October 2022 than in October 2021. No ex-vessel prices for any count size in October 2022 were reported for the South Atlantic.
Please click the following link to view the Southern Shrimp Alliance’s compilation and summary of October 2002-2022 shrimp landings in the Gulf of Mexico, October 2018-2022 shrimp landings in the South Atlantic, and ex-vessel prices for October 2018-2022 in the Gulf of Mexico and October 2018-2021 in the South Atlantic: https://www.shrimpalliance.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/October-2022-Landings.pdf