Don's Crabs

Tag? crabs ? the market? Hampton Waterfront
From? http://www.china-food-wholesaler.com/

John Graham has been buying crabs and selling their sweet white meat from a plant on the front of Hampton for decades. He is officially retired, but Monday was working and steaming crabs - for free - worried that the family business can not survive.
"I continue to run the numbers, and I do not really see how they can make it work," Graham said during a break, his T-shirt soaked with sweat.
He described a three-headed threat to his company, Graham & Rollins Seafood Inc., and Virginia crab industry as a whole. The threats have struck at the same time this summer, as a perfect storm.
They are: a shortage of foreign workers, caused by concerns about national policies on illegal immigration, and the market pressures of cheap imports and crabs, which are increasingly replacing the crabs caught in restaurants, grocery stores and packing plants and strict new regulations to protect declining populations of crabs in the Chesapeake Bay.
For the first time in years - "Honestly, I do not remember the last time that we did that," Graham said - the company has declared a "no market" status.
The statement said a team of local watermen to catch crabs for Graham & Rollins, but with ripple effects affecting the state sector, "basically means we can not buy more crabs, so the guys might as well stay home, "said his son, Johnny Graham, vice president of the company.
At this time last year, more than 100 workers, mostly from Mexico on temporary work visas known as H2-B, taken through piles of crabs at the Hampton facility. This summer, without visas, the company collected only 18 workers.
"We have a lot of crabs - I get calls every day asking if we buy more," the elder Graham said. "We simply do not have anyone to pick them up."
The labor shortage is hampering operations at even the few crab processing plants in the state, according to Graham and other merchants. There were dozens of plants around the bay, but today only a handful remain.
The labor shortage has become so acute that Graham is weighing the possibility of moving to Mexico to Virginia crab picking, then flying back to Hampton for sale.
"It's all about volume," he said. "Without volume, we can not compete."
Without enough products to sell, the crab industry is being undermined by cheap imports, mainly from Indonesia, China, Malaysia and Mexico.
Crab meat produced in these countries is comparable in quality to crabs in the bay, is more abundant and sells far below domestic prices, according to traders.
David Bell buys Bay crabs directly from watermen, mostly on the East Coast, and sells them in markets and seafood processing plants across the state.
Bell said boatmen less catching crabs these days, given the high cost of fuel and the growing frustration of state regulation. The result, he said, was a race "huge crab recent weeks, more than we can even sell."
"The funny thing is - if it can be considered funny - is that the governor keeps saying the empty bay crabs," said Bell. "Well, I have news: It's not."
Greg Finney, an Eastern Shore waterman, said there are so many crabs there at the bottom of the bay, and packing houses so reluctant to accept that a.