October 30, 2014 — As if links to slavery and environmental ills weren't enough to sully the shrimp's reputation, now this favourite ocean crustacean is all mixed up in seafood fraud, too.
Today, Oceana, the largest international advocacy group dedicated to marine conservation, released a report showing that almost a third of shrimp samples (called prawns in the UK) taken from over 100 sources in the United States were misrepresented by origin, fishing method, or species. Oceana is the same group that last year released the investigation into seafood fraud and revealed that one-third of US finfish are labelled as the wrong species.
The new focus on shrimp makes sense, since it's not only the most traded seafood worldwide, but also the most commonly consumed in the US, the report says. "We eat over one billion pounds of shrimp [annually in the US]," says Kimberly Warner, senior scientist at Oceana, and lead author on the report.
The crustacean is already associated with dire human rights violations in parts of Asia, where the fishing industry is one of the largest providers of shrimp to the US, but has also been charged with human trafficking and abuses tantamount to slavery. Ecologically speaking, fishing for wild shrimp typically involves destructive bottom trawling and nets that catch marine life indiscriminately, while the majority of shrimp aquaculture is known for polluting the coastal habitats it inhabits, including delicate mangroves.
Read the full story at The Guardian