FORT MYERS BEACH, Fla. (WINK) \u2014 President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced plans to create a label for American-made seafood, aiming to change the seafood industry in Southwest Florida.<\/p>\n
Kennedy Jr. said they are trying to reopen markets for Southwest Florida commercial fishermen with the American-made label. Christine Gala, a Fort Myers Beach shrimper whose family grew up in the industry, said a label for Florida seafood is long overdue.<\/p>\n
“We just want all these imports are coming from countries that don’t have the same rules and regulations we have, and we want them to have to do the same thing we do, abide by the same rules, and that isn’t happening, so that would that that’s a big thing there,” Gala said.<\/p>\n
Kennedy Jr. said during his speech that U.S. commercial fishermen have the strongest environmental regulations and greatest sustainability regulations, but it puts them at a disadvantage against other fishermen across the world. He used Vietnam and Cambodia’s shrimping practices as an example.<\/p>\n
“They have companies that go in there, they fence off a mangrove swamp, they poison the fish in it, they grow shrimp. They can do that for five seasons, and all the mangroves are dead. They destroy the environment. The shrimp are so loaded with antibiotics and disinfectants that no European country will take them,” Kennedy Jr. said.<\/p>\n
Gala said Hurricane Ian wiped out Southwest Florida shrimping and the area is still behind in the market. She said only 3% to 5% of the shrimp in the U.S. is domestic and the rest is imported shrimp.<\/p>\n
“They need to know: is it a local product or is it an import? And that’s all we ask. That truth in labeling. We’ve been trying to get a labeling law here in Florida. Southern Shrimp Alliance is an eight-state alliance from Texas to North Carolina, all of those states have labeling laws except for Florida and North Carolina,” Gala said.<\/p>\n
Gala also said imported shrimp has dropped the local price as low as what it was in the 1990s. With prices on fuel and supplies for shrimping increasing, it has been hard to sustain in the local shrimping industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FORT MYERS BEACH, Fla. (WINK) \u2014 President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437194,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210,409,158467,171086,28,85766,897,171087,51806,24766,5242,13328,3396,171085,4945,9102],"class_list":["post-437193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news","tag-donald-trump","tag-economy-of-the-united-states","tag-fla-u-s","tag-florida","tag-food-and-drug-administration","tag-fort-myers","tag-human-services-secretary","tag-kennedy","tag-politics-of-the-united-states","tag-president","tag-robert-f-kennedy-jr","tag-seafood","tag-seafood-products","tag-trump-administration","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}