About $50 million in Gulf of Mexico seafood marketing efforts will hit the national market over the next two years, attempting to overturn the negative perception of local seafood brought on by the BP oil spill. Louisiana will receive $30 million of that chunk donated by BP, with Alabama, Florida and Mississippi receiving pieces of the remaining share.
Two recent surveys on perception of Gulf seafood show that sentiment really hasn't changed much in the past two years.
One of them, which Wes Harrison, a Louisiana State University professor of agribusiness marketing, is completing, shows that 70 percent of people across the nation still have varying degrees of concern about Gulf seafood and about 30 percent nationally still say they won't eat Gulf seafood because of the spill. That's about the same results that Harrison saw from surveys he conducted last year.
While the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board, which commissioned the Harrison study, released some of the survey results this week, the full study won't be available for about a month.
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