I love seafood. Be it a delicious tuna steak, oysters on the half shell, or enjoying a crab feast, I'm always buying good quality, fresh, healthy seafood to cook for my friends and family.
Now, due to gross negligence from an oil company and its contractors, I'm going to have to pay a lot more for it:
Jim Catanese, president of Catanese Classic Seafoods on the East Bank of the Flats, which supplies seafood to more than 200 restaurants, clubs and hotels, says prices for shucked oysters and Gulf shrimp have jumped as much as 15 percent.
Already there's been a 15% increase, and we don't have any idea how long it's going to for BP to figure out a way to stop this disaster. It could be weeks, months, or years. No one knows. And the price of seafood will keep going up and up and more and more of the gulf and its fauna are polluted by the gushing oil.
Look at what this oil disaster is doing to the price of shrimp, even though most don't even come from the Gulf.
"Even though most of the shrimp sold in the U.S. doesn't come from the Gulf area, we did notice our prices going up from $7.50 to $8 a pound," he said. "There are some companies who may be taking advantage of that situation to raise their prices."
There must be something the government can do to force BP to take ownership of the ripple-effects their negligence is having on the greater economy, seafood included. Whether this be rebates to wholesalers and consumers or a blanket tax credit funded by fines to BP, there needs to be a way to take the impact from this man-made disaster off of the average person and put it back squarely on the corporate entity that caused it.
And this needs to happen sooner, rather than later, because we're getting close to hurricane season:
Catanese's biggest fear is that the upcoming hurricane season could blow the oil slick around the Florida Keys and up the Eastern seaboard.
"Depending on which way the wind blows, it could be devastating," he said.
"It's certainly fair to say that the market will go up on this, but how much it'll go up is anybody's guess," he added. "I've never seen any kind of crisis happen and people not raise prices."