Monthly Archives: June 2009

Mark Bittman linked this article by Jim Carrier on the global shrimp industry. It’s compact and thorough, and it doesn’t give much quarter to any period in shrimp history after about 1910. The 20th-century ocean fisheries delivered better shrimp than the farms, but they weren’t a hell of a lot more sustainable.

The story of the globalized shrimp industry, though, gets into a whole other kind of ugly. The last few paragraphs are shocking:

Shrimp: The Truth | Orion Magazine

TODAY, IF YOU LIVE more than a hundred miles from the Gulf Coast, the shrimp you eat most likely come from a foreign farm. You can tour these farms while standing at your supermarket seafood freezer and reading labels. The top ten importing countries are Thailand, Indonesia, Ecuador, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Mexico, India, Bangladesh, and Guyana. The wholesale value of their shrimp is $4 billion a year.

Despite that income, citizens in the developing world have protested shrimp farms—and been killed for doing so. The Blues of a Revolution, a book published in 2003 by a consortium of environmental and indigenous groups, described Honduran shrimp farms ringed by barbed wire and watchtowers and armed guards. Between 1992 and 1998, in the Bay of Fonseca near large shrimp farms, “11 fishermen have been found dead by shooting or by machete injuries . . . no one has been brought to justice.”

One story from the book I cannot shake involved Korunamoyee Sardar, a Bangladeshi woman who, on November 7, 1990, joined a protest against a new shrimp farm near Harin Khola. She was shot in the head, cut into pieces, and thrown into a Bangladesh river. A monument stands where she was murdered. It reads: “Life is struggle, struggle is life.”

Red Lobster, which buys 5 percent of the world’s shrimp, is Bangladesh’s biggest U.S. customer. The restaurant did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.

via Shrimp: The Truth | Orion Magazine.