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Oil Spill’s Effects on the Food Industry

  • Heidee
  • May 6, 2010

The collapse created a great loss to the victims.Late last month, BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank, killing 11 men; and now covers an area bigger than Luxembourg (130 miles by 70 miles). With 5,000 barrels of oil gushing into the ocean each day, it has reached the coast of Louisiana and is now creeping along the coastline towards Florida. Around 6,800 square miles of fishing waters have been abandoned and protective barriers stretch across 48,000 feet and four states along the shoreline. People are beginning to fear that it will become the biggest oil spill since the Exxon Valdez disaster twenty years ago.

Now we are all familiar with the environmental impact of oil spills, all but blasted to us in the form of pictures of suffering wildlife. And while of course that is the biggest impact, there are also other factors that this disaster affects like the economy, with the beaches and tourism industry bound to suffer. Then there is also food supply.

The spill threatens hundreds of species of wildlife, including birds, dolphins and the fish, shrimp, oysters and crabs that make the Gulf Coast one of the nation’s most abundant sources of seafood. Louisiana has closed some fishing grounds and oyster beds because of the risk of oil contamination. Louisiana is the No. 1 provider of shrimp, oysters, crab and crawfish in the United States, providing about a third of the seafood consumed in nation and $2.4 billion a year to the state economy.

James Beard award-winning chef, John Besh, says: “I grew up around fishermen, and now at Restaurant August and all six of my restaurants I use only fish and seafood from our waters: 500 pounds of shrimp and at least 100 pounds of crabmeat a day from our sweet crabs, and I sell a good 500 pounds of finfish a day, from cobia to grouper to snapper to speckled trout to redfish, flounder, and sheepshead. It’s all from our waters. We haven’t seen a decrease in supply yet, but next week we expect it, because of where the slick has moved: the port of Venice, Louisiana, where oil is starting to wash ashore, is a major hub of seafood in and out of the Gulf. We’ll definitely see a break in supply. But what we’re really worried about is all the microorganisms that rely on that marsh. The shrimp and the crabs feed off of those little microorganisms, and all of our other fisheries depend on them.” If other chefs are as dependent as he is on Louisiana’s harvests, then the restaurant industry could be in big trouble.

Meanwhile, Wendy Waren, vice president of communications for the Louisiana Restaurant Association, says that the group was monitoring the BP oil spill situation closely and that they are trying to get the word out that the state’s seafood is still safe to eat. “Fishermen and suppliers are confident that there will not be an interruption in the state or nation’s ability to get quality Louisiana seafood,”she says. Let’s hope she’s right.

Louis Skrmetta, who runs a company called Ship Island Excursions that takes tourists to the Gulf Islands National Seashore, tells Fox: “This is the worst possible thing that could happen to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It will wipe out the oyster industry. Shrimping wouldn’t recover for years. It would kill family tourism. That’s our livelihood.”

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