Saving Seafood

Southern Shrimp Alliance requests Indian shrimp be added to US Labor Department’s list of goods produced with forced labor

March 26, 2024 — The Southern Shrimp Alliance (SSA) has issued a formal request that Indian shrimp be added to the U.S. Department of Labor’s 2024 List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor.

The list is released annually, though the 2023 report has still not been issued. In the 2022 report, Taiwan, Thailand, China, Bangladesh, and Myanmar were called out for the alleged use of forced labor in their fishing or shrimp-processing sectors. In the 2020 report, Brazil, Cambodia, El Salvador, Kenya, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, and Yemen were cited as having child labor present in their seafood industries, while countries listed as having forced labor in their seafood sectors included China, Taiwan, Thailand, Bangladesh, Ghana, and Indonesia.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

6 Takeaways From The Indian Shrimp Labor Abuse Allegations By CAL, AP and Outlaw Ocean Project

March 25, 2024 — India is one of the largest producing countries of shrimp, exporting 653 million pounds to the U.S. alone in 2023, which represents 37.6% of imports. But now, the industry is facing some serious allegations. This week the Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL), the Associated Press (AP), and the Outlaw Ocean Project (OOP) have all accused India’s shrimp industry of human rights and environmental abuses.

On Wednesday CAL released their report titled “Hidden Harvest: Human Rights and Environmental Abuses in India’s Shrimp Industry.” The 97-page document, which is based on over 150 interviews with workers and other stakeholders, sheds light on abusive conditions, forced labor, environmental harms and certification schemes.

“Human rights and environmental abuses in global shrimp aquaculture have been documented for over a decade,” the press release from CAL explains. “Yet, India— despite its huge market share—has remained under the radar. Indian shrimp have been considered a “low-risk” source, even with telltale signs of abuse. CAL’s multi-year field investigations and interviews provide some of the first documentation of the widespread abusive and dangerous labor and environmental practices in the Indian shrimp sector—including shrimp products certified to be socially and environmentally responsible by the industry’s largest certification programs.”

Read the full article at Seafoodnews.com

Responses flood in to reports alleging problems in India’s shrimp industry

March 23, 2024 — Separate reports from the Corporate Accountability Lab, the Associated Press, and the Outlaw Ocean Project investigating labor and food safety issues in India’s shrimp sector have elicited a vociferous response from the seafood industry at large.

Sysco, Great American Seafood, Rich Products, Walmart, Eastern Fish Company, and Nekkanti Sea Foods issued statements outlining their buying policies and/or addressing particular issues raised by the AP article. Sysco said it has suspended its purchases of shrimp from Nekkanti pending an internal investigation into the company’s alleged use of a third-party peeling shed, which is not permitted under Sysco policy. US Foods, Aldi, Costco, Hannaford, Kroger, Stop & Shop, Walmart, and Whole Foods, Red Lobster, and the Cheesecake Factory were also named as buying shrimp from Nekkanti, as listed on Nekkanti’s website.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

AP finds grueling conditions in Indian shrimp industry that report calls ‘dangerous and abusive’

March 21, 2024 — Noriko Kuwabara was excited to try a new recipe she’d seen on social media for crispy shrimp spring rolls, so she and her husband headed to Costco’s frozen foods aisle. But when she grabbed a bag of farm-raised shrimp from the freezer and saw “Product of India,” she wrinkled her nose.

“I actually try to avoid shrimp from India,” said Kuwabara, an artist. “I hear some bad things about how it’s grown there.”

She sighed and tossed the bag in her cart anyway.

Kuwabara’s dilemma is one an increasing number of American consumers face: With shrimp the leading seafood eaten in the United States, the largest supplier in this country is India, where the industry struggles with labor and environmental problems.

The Associated Press traveled in February to the state of Andhra Pradesh in southeast India to document working conditions in the booming industry, after obtaining an advance copy of an investigation released Wednesday by the Chicago-based Corporate Accountability Lab, a human rights legal group, that found workers face “dangerous and abusive conditions.”

Read the full story at the AP

Corporate Accountability Lab, AP, Outlaw Ocean reports allege forced labor, antibiotics used in Indian shrimp production

March 21, 2024 — Separate reports from the Corporate Accountability Lab, the Associated Press, and the Outlaw Ocean Project published on 20 March have painted a grim portrait of India’s shrimp industry.

The report from the Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL), a nongovernmental organization dedicated to addressing “the failure of domestic and international legal regimes to hold companies accountable for abuses in their global supply chains,” presents evidence of forced labor, child labor, and environmental problems in India’s shrimp sector.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

WTO fails to reach deal on fishing subsidies

March 4, 2024 — World Trade Organization negotiators are regrouping after failing to reach an agreement on a treaty curbing harmful fishery subsidies at the 13th Ministerial Conference in Abu Dhabi, U.A.E.

Despite optimism for a deal prior to the meeting, several developing nations, including India, rejected the proposed text in the final hours of the meeting on Saturday, 2 March, in opposition to what they described as “loopholes” for big fishing nations.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

American Shrimp Processors Association push for duties on imported shrimp from four countries

October 26, 2023 — The American Shrimp Processors Association (ASPA), an organization representing the interests of U.S. wild-caught warmwater shrimp processing, has filed trade petitions seeking additional antidumping and countervailing duties on imported shrimp.

The trade petitions, which the ASPA said are intended to address unfair dumping and illegal subsidies, consist of a request for antidumping duties on imported frozen warmwater shrimp from Ecuador and Indonesia, and countervailing duties on imported shrimp from Ecuador, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

River Traps Chew at Huge Ocean Plastics Problem

June 16, 2022 — Floating fences in India. Whimsical water- and solar-driven conveyor belts with googly eyes in Baltimore. Rechargeable aquatic drones and a bubble barrier in The Netherlands.

These are some of the sophisticated and at times low-tech inventions being deployed to capture plastic trash in rivers and streams before it can pollute the world’s oceans.

The devices are fledgling attempts to dent an estimated 8.8 million tons (8 metric tons) of plastic that gets into the ocean every year. Once there, it maims or kills marine plants and animals including whales,dolphins, and seabirds and accumulates in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other vast swirls of currents.

Trash-gobbling traps on rivers and other waterways won’t eliminate ocean plastic but can help reduce it, say officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program.

Read the full story at the Associated Press

 

Study examines how to build resilient aquatic food systems amid COVID-19

June 1, 2021 — A new study has investigated the details of how the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 impacted the availability and supply of seafood, with fish-producing countries in Asia and Africa reporting huge disruptions of their aquatic food value chain in 2020.

With nearly every fish-producing country in the world reeling from the effects of COVID-19 on production, processing, and supply of aquatic food products, the study identifies short- and long-term policy responses that are likely to shape the seafood market trends in Egypt, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, and Myanmar – with spillover effects to global availability and pricing of seafood products.

Read the full story at Seafood Source