Lindy’s Seafood owner Aubrey Vincent is watching anxiously as the cost of paper rises.

It’s one of the many raw materials she has imported to process and package her crabs for decades. But sweeping tariffs threatened to drive up the cost of critical supplies for her just weeks into the crabbing season.

“I’m not sure where we’ll be in a few months,” Vincent said.

Maryland’s crab processors have become their own endangered species. In the 1980s, there were more than 50 throughout the state; now there are less than 15 in operation. Labor shortages, overfishing in the Chesapeake Bay and imports of cheaper crabs from Venezuela have priced century-old companies out of business. In early May, the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association sent a letter to President Donald Trump lamenting that not enough was being done to save the industry for future generations.

The association declined to make the letter public, but Executive Director Bill Sieling said the tariffs and inability to address ongoing labor shortages threaten seafood processors’ survival. Sieling said the association was discouraged to see that Trump, who has said the tariffs will bolster American-made products, placed few on Venezuela, whose crab imports are undercutting the sale of Maryland crab.

“We need help, and nobody’s doing anything to help us,” he said.

Programs run by the Maryland Department of Agriculture aim to incentivize restaurants and markets who promise to use crab, including one called True Blue, which offers a special certification for retailers purchasing 75% of their total crabmeat in Maryland. Still, 95% of the state’s restaurants do not use local crabmeat, according to a department survey.

Although the tariffs are not expected to impact Venezuelan crab, they will raise the cost of other popular foreign imports.

“Almost all the metal cans we use for pasteurized crabmeat are made in China or Thailand,” Sieling said.

On April 9, Trump increased tariffs on Chinese goods by more than 100%, with certain products facing up to a 200% tax. Then, on Monday, U.S officials announced plans to roll back tariffs to 30% . The step back aims to allow the two countries to resolve their trade disputes. But for local crab processors like Jack Brooks, owner of the 100-plus-year-old J.M Clayton in Cambridge, the ongoing tit-for-tat could mean more volatile prices for supplies.

J.M. Clayton is one of the few remaining processors producing pasteurized, or canned, crabmeat, while others shift toward more frozen products. Brooks said its cannery relies on raw materials from Asia and will likely take a hit as tariffs pick up later in the season. The added costs could also threaten Brooks’ ability to keep crab pricing low; through March, his company’s fresh and pasteurized jumbo lump meat sold for about twice the price of its Venezuelan counterpart.

The new expenses could further hurt what’s become an especially difficult crabbing season. Brooks learned in April that the business wasn’t able to secure H2B visas for seasonal immigrant workers — a labor force that’s kept the industry running for decades.

The H2B visa program is a lottery initiated by the Department of Labor in 2019 that randomly places employers into groups and disburses the visas they need until a congressionally authorized cap is hit.

In January, Brooks asked for 54 workers to buoy him through November. He got zero.

“We can’t compete if we’re not staffed,” he said, adding that the inability to secure consistent labor for what is already a limited and highly variable job has compromised deals with vendors and led some of his colleagues to shutter. He’ll have to manufacture a quarter of the product he usually processes, and he is unsure whether his business will have to close during the season.

Brooks was pleased, however, to see Trump continue the precedent set by his predecessors of reissuing an additional cluster of visas, which will give the J.M. Clayton owner another shot to bring workers over on a murky timeline later in May.

Certain industries, such as fish roe processors, skirted the visa limit through lobbying efforts. Brooks’ company has worked with state representatives to do the same with little success. He referred to the lack of action on the issue, along with recent efforts by the administration to address the challenges facing seafood processors, “toothless.”

“Their woes are legit,” said másLabor Executive Director Chris Ball, whose firm assists seafood processors in securing seasonal visas.

“About 40% of our customers, which are crab processors and [other seafood owners] in the region, get boxed out,” he said, noting that his firm’s data shows that, year after year, the system struggles to certify as many workers as are requested.

“The workers aren’t out there and the crabs aren’t out there like they used to be,” said Patty Laird, a former manager with a 42-year tenure at Handy Seafood in Crisfield. “My last 10 years it was really hard to find people [to hire], and each year it got worse and worse.”

Last month, Handy, one of the oldest crab processors in the country, put its Crisfield plant up for sale. In the ’80s, the company was a leading employer in Maryland seafood, placing the town at the forefront of the state’s multimillion-dollar crabbing industry.

The company, which will continue to sell crab crakes and other seafood products through its corporate headquarters in Salisbury, declined to comment on its Crisfield departure. Town Mayor Darlene Taylor, herself a former crab picker for Handy, said it’s hard to imagine what Crisfield would have become without it.

“Seafood is our legacy, but it‘s not our future,” she said.

Tina Somers, a waterman in Somerset County, also isn’t sure what will become of her industry. “It feels like they’re trying to make us a thing of the past,” she said. The loss of processing at Handy Seafood and other plants has decimated her peers.

Fewer buyers means Somers has less control over pricing and there is more competition among watermen, whom she said are dwindling in numbers as much as the Chesapeake’s Maryland crab.

“I used to be able to look at a crabmeat container and I’d know where it was and can tell you where in Maryland it was processed,” she said. “I do have the fear that those days could be over.”