The Political Economy of Household Commodity Production in the Louisiana Shrimp Fishery

Abstract

The Louisiana shrimp fishery is marked by the ownership and operation of vessels by familial households, an open‐access management regime, and socially embedded inter‐firm relationships among shrimpers, docks and processors. These elements of the contemporary fishery were constituted through historically and geographically specific processes of change in harvesting and processing technology, the social organization of labour processes and market exchanges, and the politics of fishery management in the state. These processes shaped producers' responses to a severe socio‐economic crisis in the 2000s, a cost–price squeeze of collapsing shrimp prices and mounting production expenses. Shrimpers' households kept boats operating in the short term at the expense of living standards and intergenerational continuity, rising fuel prices and falling shrimp prices slashed shrimpers' income from harvesting wild shrimp, and business relations grew more distant, tenuous and conflictual as enterprises each sought their share of a much smaller surplus.