Shrimp - The Devastating Delicacy

Latest:
December 18, 2000: Ecuador outlaws the destruction of Mangroves for shrimp farming
November 28, 2000: Greenpeace raises consumer awareness of the cost of tropical shrimp in Austria
October 15, 2000: Greenpeace Ship 'MV Arctic Sunrise' starts Ecuador tour
Check out the tour updates

Deep-fried, sautéed, skewered, or dipped in cocktail sauce, people in the US, Europe and Japan love to eat shrimp. But the appeal of this popular crustacean is as thin as the creature's shell. Wild shrimp are generally caught by bottom trawling, dragging the nets along the sea bottom. Landings of wild shrimp from "capture" fisheries have hovered between 2 to 3 million tons a year. But, with virtually all of the world's major stocks of wild shrimp heavily or overexploited, there simply aren't enough shrimp to meet the giant consumer demand.

Much of the shrimp sold in restaurants and supermarkets today is cultivated in large factory-style shrimp farms carved out of the coastal landscape, which produced more than 700,000 tons last year. Their production is expected to double in the next decade. Today more than one-half of the shrimp consumed in the U.S. is from shrimp farms rather than from the sea.

But all of this cheap shrimp carries a heavy cost. Shrimp farms are causing devastating ecological harm and social upheaval in tropical coastal countries in Asia and Latin America.

Read more:
Arctic Sunrise in Ecuador
Ripped out at the Roots - The destruction of Mangrove forests.
Human Impacts - The effects of this lucrative export trade on local communities.
Don't Be 'Shellfish' - What Greenpeace is doing and what you can do.
Shrimp facts and figures
Photo Gallery