Crabs caught in the morning are boiled and then dumped on a table to be cooled and sorted in the Pontchartrain Blue Crab facility in Slidell.

Roy Darby Jr. has been crabbing the shallow waters of Lake Pontchartrain alongside his father and uncles for more than 20 years. But in the decades that the family has made their living from the lake, they've never endured a year like this past one.

"We have the product, but there's no demand, really," he said. "If sales weren't coming from out of state, we wouldn't be crabbing because there's no market here now."

In the hope of drumming up support for the embattled crabbing industry, crabbers like Darby met with state representatives at the Pontchartrain Blue Crab processing facility in Slidell this week. The crabbers demonstrated how a batch of snapping crabs ends up as a pound of lump meat or as a soft-shell entrée.

The all-day educational event was intended to illustrate how labor-intensive the industry is while highlighting the challenges crabbers face.

Ever since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita pummeled the state's coastal regions last year, crab prices have plummeted by 20 - 30 percent, said Harlon Pearce, chairman of the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board.

Many of the high-end restaurants in New Orleans, major buyers of the seafood before the hurricanes, haven't reopened, stifling local demand.

But public perception across the country has also affected demand. For several months after the storm, out-of-state buyers believed the entire Gulf Coast had turned into "toxic soup," Pearce said.

To calm fears of polluted seafood, the Seafood Board, along with the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals and a barrage of federal agencies, conducted hundreds of thousands of tests for toxins in lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne in the first couple months following Katrina.

"The results found that there were no elevated levels of toxins in the lakes or the waterways," said Robert Johannessen, the communications director for the Department of Health and Hospitals. "Nor were toxins found in samples taken from the seafood."

The natural estuaries connecting the lakes to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico constantly filter out toxins, Pearce said.

"It's almost like pouring a thimble of Vodka into a bathtub," he said, referring to the amount of toxins lingering in the lakes, "and thinking you're going to get drunk."

When prices are low due to lack of demand, the soft-shell market helps crabbers earn extra income because they fetch higher prices. But crabs only shed their shells for a few months in the spring and fall. And harvesting them is extremely labor-intensive. Once crabs show signs of molting, they have to be moved into shallow tanks and checked every two to three hours to make sure the other crabs don't eat them.

"I don't think people realize how much (work) it takes to get one soft shell crab on your plate," said Mark Schexnayder, a biologist with the AgCenter at Louisiana State University.

Although the soft shell market is lucrative, it doesn't provide enough revenue to cover the drop in prices seen over the past several years. An influx of cheaper imports has hampered the industry for years, he said.

"But now (the crabbers) are really struggling because a lot of them lost their boats, their house, their gear," he said. "And the labor shortage is really hurting the industry because even if they have their boats, the docks don't have the labor to hand peel the crabs."

Over the past year, 40 percent of the state's crabbers and dock workers have abandoned the industry, many for better paying construction jobs, said Peter Peterson, the chairman of the Louisiana Crab Taskforce.

The industry has received no financial aid, he added, and most crabbers don't quality for federal Small Business Loans because they lost their gear and hence their ability to repay the loan.

"It seems like all the funds went to oyster farmers and shrimpers," he said. "They have very powerful lobbyists. They do a good job, and they get a lot of money."

The industry is trying to secure federal aid to help crabbers replace their boats and gear and to rebuild processing facilities often reduced to slabs in the wake of last year's storms, Peterson said.

"Without the facilities and the help," he added, "the whole infrastructure is weak, very weak."

To help jump-start the crab industry and compete with imports, the Seafood Board is working to sell the seafood to "any quality restaurant and market across the country," Pearce said.

"You get into a rut sometimes, and you just get this, this and this all the time, not realizing that there's a better product out there," he said. "So we want them to know that they can get fresh and freshly frozen Louisiana seafood at any time."

The Board is also working to rebuild processing facilities using the most advanced technology, he said. The proposed state-of-the-art changes will begin in the shrimp industry because it ships 130 million Ibs. a year, far more than any other seafood producer in the state. But as the new processing techniques are perfected in the shrimping industry, the Board will mirror those changes in the oyster, crab, crawfish and fish industries. The changes are expected to allow seafood plants to custom-process orders for clients all over the world.

"Every country has a different way they like things done," Pearce said. "Japan, for instance, processes shrimp completely differently than we do. So we need to evolve into a program that can evolve overseas."

For decades, Louisiana drove the world seafood economy. Today, Asia and Europe dominate the market, he said.

"But we need to get back into that because we're in a world economy. And there are things to learn from these guys, especially when it comes to processing," Pearce said. "In Japan, people have grown up eating seafood for centuries. They don't eat a dead fish .... But we have a heritage here, too. So we need to teach guys here how to change after dealing with the imports and the storms."