Shrimper Praises Trump Tariffs, Says 94% Of Our Shrimp Imported

South Carolina shrimper Craig Reaves on Friday praised President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imports to rectify what the president views as a decades-long trade imbalance between the United States and other countries.

Reaves said the seafood industry has been getting crushed for decades by increased imports, and highlighted that these other nations are hurting ecosystems, giving Americans a bad product, and using other unsavory practices. Trump’s tariffs will give fishermen “immediate relief” and the space to rebuild and save the industry, he argued.

“I am a lifelong shrimper, my dad was a shrimper, so we are generational fishermen, and we have been getting killed by imports, for not just years, but literally decades,” he said on Fox News. “We’ve been suffering for a long, long time, and these tariffs, we believe, are going to give us some immediate relief.”

The tariffs are “also bringing attention to our industry, which is dying,” Reaves continued. “We have outsourced our whole industry; 94% of the shrimp consumed in the United States are imported.”

Fox News anchor Sandra Smith noted that the United States has substantially increased how much shrimp is important here since 2014, now totaling 1.6 billion pounds.

“I think, unfortunately, we have outsourced everything in the United States,” Reaves responded. “This is what we have done to the seafood industry, we’ve outsourced it to Southeast Asia, South America, Ecuador, India.” Smith noted that 42% of all imported shrimp come from India, and 27% come from Ecuador.

Reaves said that imported shrimp is not better than domestic shrimp, but is less expensive.

“They are pond raised, farm raised product — they do not care about the environment in Southeast Asia, they are destroying ecosystems … they’re using illegal hormones, forced labor, slave labor — all these things are documented,” the fisherman said.

“So it is absolutely not a good product,” Reaves said. “The difference is, it is cheaper, and something we trying to say, ‘Good seafood is not cheap; cheap seafood is not good.'”

Reaves noted that, currently, the domestic shrimp industry does not have the infrastructure to fill the demand from United States citizens, but hopes they’ll be able to rebuild.

“The seafood industry, we’ve been getting destroyed for decades, so we’ve been living under pressure and pain, and I think this short-term pain is worth it in the end if we can save our industry,” Reaves said, referring to the likely general coming price increases due to tariffs.

“Unfortunately, we have outsourced way too much in the United States. We need to bring it home.”

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Related: Trump’s Tariffs Shine The Light On American-Made Goods