Hundreds Of Billions Of Farmed Shrimp Die Every Year For No Good Reason?

In researching and writing about some of the worst foods for climate change — which are beef, dairy products, lamb/mutton, farmed shrimp, and pork — I came across something I had never heard of: annual farmed shrimp mortality.

It was quite a while ago that I thought about writing this follow-up article, and I had this figure in mind – one billion farmed shrimp per year die because there is an annual mortality rate for farmed shrimp which is about 50 percent. Today, after revisiting the source I had been looking at months ago, it turns out it’s over one billion per day, not per year. So, several hundred billion farmed shrimp die each year without being utilized for food. That is, they don’t even have a chance to be sold and eaten because they die on shrimp farms. The mortality rate and the number of farmed shrimp that die every year is extremely high. What kind of industry is that?

The source I first saw is Rethink Priorities. Here’s what they wrote: “Mortality rates are high in shrimp aquaculture, implying welfare threats are common. It is typical for ~50% of shrimp to die before reaching slaughter age. This equates to around 1.2 billion premature deaths a day on average.”

In some farms the mortality rate may be higher. “Even in organic mangrove farms with low densities (three to five shrimp per square meter), 95–97% of shrimp die before harvest. This type of ‘free-range farming’ in shrimp, I learned, equates to almost certain death for all but the luckiest few.”

There are also alleged labor abuses in some farmed shrimp companies. “Choice Canning is far from an isolated bad actor in India’s $8.4 billion shrimp industry. Farinella’s whistleblower account coincides with a three-year investigation, ‘Hidden Harvest,’ published in March by the Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL), exposing the human rights abuses rampant across India’s shrimp sector. The report documents how India’s shrimp is farmed and processed by a highly exploited workforce, rife with horrific abuses, including child labor, sexual harassment, debt bondage, and forced labor—to then be sold to many of the largest U.S. grocery retailers, often with a sustainability promise.”

At grocery stores, there may be many colorful plastic bags of frozen shrimp that come from shrimp farms where potentially about half of them die. Do consumers at these stores have any idea what they are supporting when they purchase farmed shrimp? Some of the frozen shrimp bags in the stores might have labels using words such as “sustainably sourced” or “sustainable certified.” Who knows if those claims are accurate or lies used to sell farmed shrimp that was most likely not sustainably raised.

A person might think “if farmed shrimp is so bad then I will just buy wild shrimp,” but wild shrimp has its own problems. “Beyond the impacts on shrimp themselves, there are some other challenges associated with shrimp fisheries around the world: Bycatch. The weight of catch from shrimp trawlers sometimes reaches even 80–90% non-target animals. This includes other shrimp and invertebrates, finfish, turtles, marine mammals, and seabirds.” The bycatch is often killed or harmed and discarded.

It isn’t necessary for people to eat shrimp, because there are many other food sources that don’t cause so much destruction.