We eat more shrimp than any other kind of seafood, and, for many of us, it's theseafood we consume. It’s easy to understand why: Shrimp is sweet, versatile, and, thanks to massive farming operations in Southeast Asia, one of the cheapest proteins in the freezer aisle.
But a problem was on the horizon. This first boom had been made possible in part by importing shrimp from early farms in Taiwan and Central America, which had discovered that the tiger prawn could grow fast and massive in high-density environments. Nobody anticipated that the species was also highly susceptible to diseases like vibriosis and yellow head, which, by 1990, were wiping out entire farming operations in a matter of days.
But in fact, the industry has already directly created humanitarian crises. As domestic demand for shrimp has grown, intentionally opaque supply chains have created a system in which even the companies importing shrimp know little about its origins, giving rise to one of the most robust slave-labor industries in the world. Over the last 20 years,
* The Eco Shrimp Garden shrimp purchased for the photography for this piece are priced at $38 per pound. An early aquaculture pool setup used by Eco Shrimp Garden. Jean Claude Frajmund is the man with the net on the left. [Photograph courtesy of Eco Shrimp Garden] As often happens, a mistake led to the pivotal breakthrough. One day, Brown left the filtration tanks running too long, which plunged the bacterial concentration to a mere one milligram per liter. But instead of dying en masse, the shrimp grew to adulthood 30 days faster, and proved healthier to boot. Brown soon expanded her family’s business model, working with farmers around the world as a consultant to help them implement the new system.
“Most people don’t know the difference between what we’re raising and what they’re buying in a grocery store,” she says, which means they're unlikely to pay a premium for it. As a result, RDM and other farms find themselves facing a conundrum: Without demand, there’s no viable way to scale up production, but without scaling up production, it’s impossible to lower the price, and thereby increase demand.
“But that justification only works if we think that sustainable shrimp is actually going to be achievable in the developed world in a way that will allow Walmart to be carrying cheap, frozen, humanely produced, and slavery-free shrimp,” Fischer says. “And I think there are real reasons to worry about that.
eatwild seafood
I've been thinking about this. And if you see the conditions in some shrimp farms you might not want to eat shrimps again. Is there anyone around who knows how to breed shrimp in the backyard? That would really solve this problem for me
The Deepwater Horizon disaster likely ruined Gulf based shrimp forever.