Distressing news about shrimp

A couple of months ago we reported on high shrimp prices, but that seems inconsequential compared to today’s report by The Guardian on the shrimp industry. The news was both shocking and appalling. An investigation by the paper found “that the world’s largest prawn farmer, the Thailand-based Charoen Pokphand (CP) Foods, buys fishmeal, which it feeds to its farmed prawns, from some suppliers that own, operate or buy from fishing boats manned with slaves.”

People have been forced to work for no pay on slave ships, going unfed, enduring beatings and even “torture and execution-style killings. Some were at sea for years; some were regularly offered methamphetamines to keep them going. Some had seen fellow slaves murdered in front of them.” The slave labor is used to harvest unwanted fish that are used to make fishmeal, which is then fed to shrimp farmed in Thailand.

Major retailers are selling this farmed shrimp, including Walmart, Costco, Aldi, Carrefour, Tesco, and others. Many of them have issued comments on the news, vowing to work with CP Foods on eradicating the problem. For its part, CP Foods acknowledges that slave labor is involved. “We’re not here to defend what is going on,” said Bob Miller, CP Foods’ UK managing director. “We know there’s issues with regard to the [raw] material that comes in [to port], but to what extent that is, we just don’t have visibility.”

There have long been rumors of slave labor, but the Guardian has, for the first time, “established how the pieces of the long, complex supply chains connect slavery to leading producers and retailers.” CP Foods has pledged to “use its commercial weight to try to influence the Thai government to act rather than walk away from the Thai fishing industry,” and is also working on plans to use alternative proteins in its feed by 2021 if the problem can’t be solved.