Saving Seafood

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

Shipping-container shortage hampering seafood exports from Asia

January 22, 2021 — A severe shortage of shipping containers is leading to rising shipping costs and difficulty moving goods, playing havoc with seafood exporters in Asia.

The shortage has been felt by all major exporters in Vietnam, Thailand, China, and India. Data from Vietnamese seafood exporters show that the shipping cost to the European Union rose between 145 percent and 276 percent in January, compared to December last year.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

China Customs slowdown frustrating seafood suppliers

July 10, 2020 — An apparent coronavirus-related slowdown in customs processing in China is hampering exporters accessing the country’s seafood markets.

Indian seafood exporters have noticed a slowdown in checks at Chinese customs, which is backing up containers of inbound Indian shrimp, according to The Hindu BusinessLine. The average checking time has gone from three to 10 days, making Chinese buyers hesitant, according to Indian seafood exporters, some of whom suspect deliberate Chinese foot-dragging is related to a Sino-Indian border conflict in the Himalayas.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Curbs on fisheries subsidies debated at WTO meeting

December 3, 2019 — India and several other developing countries have challenged a potential agreement on fisheries subsidies currently being negotiated at the World Trade Organization, according to a 1 December report from The Hindu BusinessLine.

WTO members are working on an agreement to curb fisheries subsidies that lead to overfishing and destruction of marine life. The pact was supposed to be signed at the next ministerial meeting in June 2020. However, several areas of disagreement between developed and developing countries still exist, especially regarding an extension of the effective special and differential treatment (S&DT) provisions and exclusions. These provisions would give developing countries flexibility to subscribe to less onerous reduction commitments compared to richer countries.

Read the full story at Seafood Source