September 5, 2014 — The fall of 2007 was a bad time to own a shrimp boat in Port Clyde, Maine. Global competition from shrimp farms in East Asia had driven down the price of a pound of shrimp to just 30 cents, and fishermen were distraught.“If they wanted to make a living off 30 cents per pound, the only way they could do it was with high volume,” said Brett Tolley, a community organizer at the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance. “And that would take them toward overfishing.”
American fishermen everywhere were feeling the pinch as competition from fishing rigs and fish farms in places with lax labor laws and environmental regulations flooded the market. Their hard work just wasn’t cutting it in a country that imports 91 percent of its seafood, and — even worse for Port Clyde fishermen — 95 percent of its shrimp.
So the shrimp fishermen banded together to create Port Clyde Fresh Catch, shifting their focus from global markets to selling to their friends and neighbors. They proposed an arrangement that was new to fisheries, but had worked well for small farmers for decades. Farmers call it community-supported agriculture, and it works like this: Customers buy a share of the season’s crop at the start of each summer, and receive boxes of fresh vegetables every week.
Mimicking this model, the fishermen of Port Clyde promised to deliver a weekly box of fresh fish to residents who bought a share. It was a radical departure from the conventional sales model for fishermen in which a day’s catch is sold to a dealer, who sells it to a wholesaler or fish market, where it is scooped up by a buyer and combined with lots of other fish to ship out for resale to consumers or restaurants across the country.
Members of a nearby church pledged their support and word quickly spread among the tiny town’s 3,000 residents. Soon Port Clyde’s fishermen were earning $1 per pound for the same shrimp that had fetched just 30 cents per pound a year prior.
Now, there are about 200 community-supported fisheries in the U.S. and Canada. They are run not just by fishermen, but also by seafood lovers who want a more direct line to their dinner. “Over the past four to five years, this model has just exploded,” said Tolley. His organization has launched a website called LocalCatch.org to help people find community-supported fisheries in their region. There’s Walking Fish in North Carolina and Off the Hook in Nova Scotia. New York City has four, and Alaska has two. The biggest is Cape Ann Fresh Catch in Gloucester, Mass., serving more than 1,000 members.