10. In Search of the Perfect Prawn
“Aquaculture is being developed to reduce the pressure on wild stocks,” Al Stokes, director of the Waddell Mariculture Center in Beaufort, South Carolina, told us. “Since the shrimpers can’t possibly keep up with the growing demand for shrimp, the production must come from the farm, where they can be grown in large quantities, delivering uniform-sized shrimp on demand. That will leave a niche market for wild shrimp. Fresh wild shrimp will be local, and ideally, as the demand goes up, there will be more boats, and they will catch it all up, and aquaculture markets will fill in the difference.”
Dr. Motosaku Fujinaga was the father of modern shrimp farming. From 1930 to 1968, with an almost maniacal zeal, he learned how to spawn mother shrimp in captivity. He cultured their larvae, raised them to juveniles, and released them into ponds. He published paper after paper, corresponding with other scientists around the world, spreading his knowledge to anyone who would listen. Before his work, no one knew what shrimp larvae looked like, much less what to feed them.
The cheerful Japanese scientist who had a “wet thumb” gladly took money from the Japanese military government in World War II to research the life stages of penaeid shrimp and improve the nation’s food supply. He discovered that females wouldn’t produce eggs unless he fed them sea worms. He learned how to feed the larvae and raise them through their multiple growth stages. He discovered that larval shrimp had to be fed phytoplankton first and then be switched to zooplankton as they matured. He found that young shrimp grew best with dried squid pellets. He cultured plankton in the laboratory, trying to make commercial production possible. When the war was over he traveled to the United States in the 1950s, working with American scientists at the Bureau of Fisheries who were also experimenting with farming shrimp. Much of our knowledge of the growth and development of shrimp larvae came from this Johnny Appleseed of shrimp culture.
Aquaculture wasn’t new; it had been practiced in Asia for thousands of years, but it was more ranching than farming. Small shrimp were seined from the estuaries, placed in tidal ponds and canals, fed with fish scraps, and allowed to grow up in a predator-free environment. The tides flowed in and out of the fences and nets, bringing clean water to imprisoned shrimp and taking away their waste. When the farmers wanted some to eat, they dragged nets in the ponds or drained them, and grabbed the jumping shrimp.
Fujinaga’s dream was to start a shrimp farm in America. He surveyed both the South Atlantic and Gulf Coast of Florida with fisheries biologists, sampling the shrimp populations and collecting brood stock. He declared that Panama City, Florida was the best place to start a shrimp farm. Like Moses falling short of the Promised Land, Fujinaga personally did not succeed in doing it. But he sold the patent rights to an investment group of Japanese and American businessmen called Akima International, headed by a young man named Aki Kawaguchi, who was fluent in English. Kawaguchi approached the DuPont Corporation, trying to raise funds, but the giant chemical company had trouble conceiving of shrimp farming.
They had every reason to be wary. There was no shortage of unscrupulous pseudo-scientists to take advantage of the aquaculture boom at the time. More aquascam than aquaculture, a number of companies sprang up in Florida that had ponds seeded with shrimp and other species they claimed to have grown but that had been trawled from local estuaries. At the sight of several hundred pounds of jumping shrimp being seined out of small ponds and served at lavish dinners for would-be investors, money flowed.
Fortunately, serious scientists and businessmen also were trying to do it right. Ralston Purina jumped into developing artificial shrimp feeds and poured money into hatcheries in Crystal River and the Florida Keys. They experimented with raising pink and white shrimp in the warm-water discharge canals from the Crystal River nuclear power plant. This seemed like a good idea, except for the fact that the shrimp died from the antifoulant poisons added to keep the pipes from being clogged with barnacles. The King Ranch in Texas tried to raise shrimp, even though by then it was becoming clear that it was not profitable to grow shrimp that far north. It just wasn’t tropical enough.
Hearing the scientists and investors of Akima International talk about the vast potential of shrimp farming, John Cheshire became infected with shrimp fever, quit his job at DuPont, and started Marifarms, Ltd. in the 1960s. With missionary zeal, he raised $17 million from his family and from friends at DuPont and hired Japanese scientists. Over the vociferous objections of environmentalists, he convinced the Florida state legislature to grant him a state submerged-land lease. Marifarms fenced off part of St. Andrews Bay in Panama City, built impoundments and ponds in the marshes, and started raising shrimp. The company’s Japanese scientists built a state-of-the-art hatchery, hoping to breed a shrimp that could grow fast in overcrowded conditions.
From the beginning Marifarms in Panama City suffered biblical plagues of predators, diseases, and irate shrimpers. Angry at the loss of their fishing grounds, the local shrimpers tore down the fences, let the shrimp escape, and caught tons of them. Eventually Cheshire hired the shrimpers to work on the farm, and peace ensued. They chartered large shrimp boats to take their scientists out to trawl for gravid mother shrimp. Over several years of experimenting, they succeeded in getting white, pink, and brown shrimp to spawn in their laboratory. The eggs developed through the larval stages until they were big enough to release into the big outdoor ponds and raceways before being transferred to the holding pens in the bay.
For a decade the scientists and businessmen struggled with crabs eating holes in their nets, which leaked shrimp. They used a fish poison called rotenone in an attempt to control predatory fish, but pinfish were immune and feasted on juvenile shrimp. When low winter tides came, flocks of cormorants, pelicans, and seagulls dropped out of the sky and gorged themselves on Marifarms’ shrimp dinners. Employees had to fire guns, blow horns, and rush out in airboats to chase off the birds.
“We didn’t count on the winter tides and north winds that blew the water out of the bay and left the shrimp stranded on the mudflats,” John told us one night at his home in Panama City. “The seagulls had a feast with our profits. Nor did we consider the tons of hydroids and sea squirts that covered our nets, which created a wall of resistance to waves and made it easy for the next hurricane to rip them apart. When a hurricane struck, it tore down our nets, overtopped the ponds, and released millions of shrimp, who swam happily out to sea. As soon as the storm passed, a fleet of shrimp boats rushed in, and we watched helplessly as the entire crop was hauled away.”
The would-be ocean farmers rebuilt the fences and put more juvenile shrimp into their impoundments. They fed them by spraying a ground-up slurry of smelly fish from a barge that polluted the bottoms in their ponds. Disease swept through the ponds, killing most of the stock. With all the problems, a $50,000 loss was considered a good year.
Harvests were anemic at best, but it wasn’t the birds, shrimpers, or fences that led to Marifarms’ ultimate demise. The seasonal climate allowed only one crop a year. Shrimp farming would have to move to the tropics, where shrimp could grow year round, harvesting three crops instead of one. They tried to move to Ecuador. But Cheshire briefly landed in jail when he refused to pay off corrupt local officials, and unknown tropical viruses wiped out the shrimp. In the end, after two decades of struggle, Marifarms went bankrupt in 1980. Many of Cheshire’s employees then moved on to other farms around the world, taking their technology with them (see Figures 10.1 and 10.2).
Figure 10.1 A shrimp feeding truck on a Texas shrimp farm
Courtesy of American Shrimp, LLC
Figure 10.2 Texas shrimp ponds with aerators running
Courtesy of American Shrimp, LLC
Meanwhile, Ralston Purina was trying to grow two other species of South American white shrimp in ponds in Brazil. With diseases and poor yields, these investors also had little to show for all their efforts, and they were running out of patience. It looked like shrimp farming was on the rocks. Desperately their scientists searched for a new shrimp that wouldn’t expire in crammed pond conditions. They experimented with growing eight different species of penaeids until they finally settled on Litopenaeus (=Penaeus) vannamei.
The western white shrimp, vannamei, is native to the Pacific Coast of Central and South America and ranges from Mexico to Peru. Perhaps because it stays back in the mangrove swamps, it tolerates living in overcrowded conditions. Vannamei reproduces best in murky water, likes algae, eats less meat, and doesn’t compete with other shrimp; hence, it grows better. Investors were overjoyed when their eggs hatched and 110,000 post-larvae grew like crazy in their ponds, all without aeration. With a little care, and no predators to eat them, they calculated that when the shrimp grew up, they’d have the equivalent of four thousand pounds per acre. Again the sun shone for the pioneering shrimp farmers.
Years before farmers discovered vannamei, a zoologist named Willard Gibbs Vanname had collected the first specimen. The Yale professor was best known for his definitive monograph on sea squirts, his work with terrestrial and freshwater isopods, and his work in ornithology. In the obscure world of museum curators and carcinologists (those who study shrimp, crabs, and lobsters), history records that on March 25, 1926, Dr. Vanname purchased a male white shrimp in the fish markets of Panama City, Panama and pickled it for the American Museum of Natural History collection, where he was curator of marine invertebrates.
There it sat for five years, having turned red in the jar of alcohol, until a staff biologist at the museum, Miss Pearl Lee Boone, described it as a new species. Apparently she admired Dr. Vanname, so she named it vannamei after him. She declared it to be the analog of the North American white shrimp, Litopenaeus (=Penaeus) setiferus, that Linnaeus had described two centuries earlier. Her paper went on to detail the spine and eyestalks and measured its legs, pinchers, and male sexual organs. In the rules of taxonomy, the author who describes a species appears after the Latin name. With the recent name changes, today the shrimp is known as Litopenaeus (=Penaeus) vannamei Boone, 1933.
In any case, Pearl Lee Boone had a hard life. In those days women had few opportunities in science, were paid next to nothing, and seldom married or had families. They lived the lives of academic nuns. From the American Museum of Natural History Boone went to Miami and worked for an aquarium for a few years, described new species of crustaceans, and published papers on the morphology of spiny lobsters in scientific journals.
With the commercial rediscovery of vannamei, shrimp farm fever spread to South Carolina, where investors madly built ponds near salt marshes. Twenty-two shrimp farms were soon operating. But when Waddell Mariculture Center in Beaufort, South Carolina had an outbreak of white spot virus, people feared that it might spread to the native wild shrimp in the bays and sounds and destroy the shrimping industry. The worst fears of environmentalists were realized when many vannamei, possibly infected with the deadly white spot virus, somehow escaped into the wild. The state of South Carolina asked shrimpers to turn in everything they found mixed in with their catches of native white shrimp. On the radio, the shrimpers quickly changed the name. “We got some of them Vanna Whites,” they’d announce, named after the ever-smiling hostess of television’s Wheel of Fortune. Vanna Whites also escaped from ponds in Texas and in Mexico, but they never lasted long in the open sea, and white spot viruses did not cause mass mortalities there.
Meanwhile, at the Waddell Center the scientists drained and sterilized their tanks and started all over again with certified disease-free South American white shrimp, Litopenaeus (=Penaeus) vannamei. They also tried to develop disease-resistant local white shrimp on an experimental basis. Eventually all the South Carolina shrimp farms closed, unable to compete with cheap foreign farmed shrimp.
To squeeze out more profits and grow more shrimp to the acre, multinational corporations in tropical countries built their ponds too close together. Because the same brood stocks were shipped to hatcheries around the world, the diseases went with them. With overcrowding, both bacterial and viral diseases with names like hematopoietic necrosis virus and baculoviral midgut gland necrosis became rampant and pestilence spread from farm to farm. Some diseases attacked the larval shrimp; others ate into the shells of the adults. The deadliest, Tara Syndrome Virus, was carried in the guts and feces of aquatic insects and destroyed up to 90 percent of the stocks.
Epidemics spread across the globe from farm to farm via infected post-larvae or aquatic insects. In a few months, starting in 1993, the entire aquaculture shrimp industry crashed when it became infected with viral diseases. In 1994 white spot virus, brought over in a batch of South American vannamei brood stock shrimp, killed off most of China’s profitable shrimp crop. Millions of pounds lay rotting on the bottom of the high-intensity “grow-out” ponds, turning the waters putrid, fouling air, and forcing China to turn away from high-intensity monoculture. In northern China at one point, the air was so foul from rotting shrimp farms that aboard airplanes, passengers gagged and held their breath on takeoff as the planes soared over the shrimp farms.
As we took off from the airport at Quingdao, China that same year en route to Shanghai, a business passenger turned to us. “I make this flight every week. You lucky. Two months ago, the shrimp farms get disease; the water turn black and stink so bad it take your breath away.” Down below, the shoreline was carved into one vast network of shrimp farms that now lay empty.
Eventually many farm ponds became so disease-ridden and polluted that they had to be abandoned. When ponds were no longer viable, the shrimp farmers moved on, plowing up new mangroves like slash-and-burn farmers to make new ponds, destroying still more fisheries.
Scientists worked around the clock, desperately applying antibiotics that controlled bacterial but not viral diseases. Extremely powerful drugs such as nitrofuran and chloramphenical were mixed into shrimp feed even though they may cause liver disease in humans. Probiotics, beneficial bacteria similar to those found in yogurt, were added to the ponds to more rapidly digest and remove fecal and other waste from the mud. Larger farms spent millions adding bigger pumps and aerators to improve water circulation and reduce disease-breeding organic buildups on the bottoms of the ponds.
To combat viral diseases, farmers bred disease-resistant brood stock from the remaining handful of surviving shrimp and implemented strict quarantine procedures. Everything entering the farm was sterilized, and the shrimp were raised in operating-room-like sterile conditions. After several years and fifteen generations, domestic shrimp became disease-resistant.
After the diseases were dealt with, shrimp farms again proliferated from the Americas to Taiwan, China, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, India, Bangladesh, South Africa, Madagascar, and other east African countries (see Figure 10.3). Giant multinational corporations such as BP, Ralston Purina, and A&P invested heavily and made a lot of money. The technicians and biologists who had worked for Marifarms were much in demand. They dispersed around the globe to tropical and semitropical countries where shrimp could be readily grown, setting up farms in Asia, Central and South America, Cuba, Africa, India, and Saudi Arabia. They experimented with local species because most countries were afraid of bringing in nonindigenous species like vannamei that might spread disease to their local shrimp.
Figure 10.3 An aerial view of a Madagascar shrimp farm
Photo courtesy of JM Amouroux, HydroTech Solutions
China’s biologists, many trained at the National Marine Fisheries Service in Galveston’s aquaculture labs, sliced and diced their coastline into a vast array of ponds and grew their native white shrimp, Fenneropenaeus (=Penaeus) chinensis. In the fishing town of Haiti in Shandong Province, the fisheries department took us to an experimental shrimp polyculture pond. A young man poled us into an impoundment, pulled up string overgrown with oysters, and shook a half-dozen tiger prawns and Chinese white shrimp into the skiff. He explained that the oysters, sea cucumbers, and tilapia helped filter out the excess phytoplankton and consumed bacteria that built up on the bottom of the ponds from uneaten shrimp food and waste, minimizing the chance of disease.
Japan kept on growing its shrimp, Marsupenaeus (=Penaeus) japonica, and farms in Africa, India, and the Middle East dug ponds and filled them with Indian Whites, Fenneropenaeus (=Penaeus) indicus. Brown and green tigers and banana shrimp were grown in Australia, and Thailand specialized in the big tiger prawns, Penaeus monodon. Costa Rica and other countries were raising freshwater prawns, Macrobrachium, the largest and perhaps least attractive-looking shrimp in the world. They attained the size of small lobsters, but the thick-shelled river shrimp were blue, didn’t taste as good, and had less market.
All shrimp have individual differences. Some need diets higher in protein than others. Some prefer mud; some crawl about; some burrow in the sand or mud; others don’t. Some like murky waters, others clear. Each species has advantages and disadvantages for farming. Some grow faster than others but might be more subject to diseases or intolerant of fluctuations in salinity. Of all the species of penaeids that shrimp farmers have attempted to grow worldwide, only the Pacific white-legged shrimp, Litopenaeus (=Penaeus) vannamei, and the black-striped tiger prawn, Penaeus monodon, have achieved stardom. By 2006, these two species made up 85 percent of all farmed shrimp.
Monodon is larger but has difficulty reproducing in captivity. Thailand is the world’s largest producer of pond-raised glistening black-and-white-striped tiger prawns that flowed into American supermarkets, but that country has difficulty finding enough brood stock to meet the demand. Tiger prawn mothers are hard to come by. Hatcheries have paid $86 to $215 apiece for gravid tiger prawns. Brought from the ocean, like American pink and brown shrimp, they mate only when the females molt, their bodies are soft, and the males can penetrate them. After several years of successive generations being raised in ponds, the female population as a whole stops producing pheromones, and males are no longer attracted to them. Also, in places like India, semiclad men and women wade through muddy water in the mangroves, pulling small nets, hoping to find wild-caught post-larval tiger shrimp to raise.
World appetite for shrimp has grown so rapidly that many Thai river farmers converted their coastal rice fields into shrimp ponds. As much as five tons of shrimp a year can be produced from a pond the size of a football field, and rice farmers who had been making $4,500 a year suddenly saw profits of $20,000 to $40,000. Yet another case of shrimp fever broke out—a boom fueled by the World Bank and multinational corporations.
By the 1990s, an environmental backlash developed against the industry because it not only created epidemics but also destroyed wetlands, polluted adjacent water bodies with shrimp waste, and displaced rice farmers. When shrimp farms go bust, a wasteland of abandoned ponds, dead trees, and contaminated land and water is left behind. Just as the California gold rush destroyed the rivers and lands in the West, the shrimp gold rush devastated mangrove forests around the world. Thousands of acres of coastal mangrove forests were cleared to make room for acres of shrimp ponds. Thailand and Ecuador lost a quarter of their mangroves, and with them went the local fisheries. Eighty to ninety percent of commercial seafood species, such as crabs, fish, and shrimp, that inhabit the tropical oceans use mangroves as a nursery. Fishermen grew angry at the loss of wild seafood and their livelihoods. To make matters worse, fertilizer-enriched waters were discharged from the ponds, further degrading water quality and impacting seafood.
In Bangladesh thousands of farmers suffered when their rice crops were damaged by seepage of salt water from the shrimp farms. Investors bought up farmers’ infertile lands and rendered the peasants landless. Three hundred thousand people were displaced in one province alone, causing violence to break out. When the tsunami struck the Indian Ocean in 2004, urban sprawl and shrimp farms in Bangladesh and Thailand were blamed for greater losses of human life, because the lost mangrove forests would have protected villages from much of the surge.
Ecuadorian and Malaysian environmental groups are calling for a boycott of cultured shrimp and a policy review of the entire shrimp industry. They do so with much justification, citing both the environmental destruction of trawler bycatch and the pollution and destructive practices of shrimp farms. But so far they haven’t had much luck. Business is still booming, with 170,000 tons of farmed tiger prawn raised annually in Thailand alone. Aquaculture shrimp account for a quarter of world production, a worldwide market valued at $6 billion at the farm gate, and over $20 billion retail. Giant corporations like Aqua Star (BP), Wal-Mart, and Red Lobster keep buying more shrimp. Because of worldwide certification, all farmed shrimp must now be tested and certified as being uncontaminated with antibiotics and chemicals. Shrimp are being grown in ponds around the world like broiler chickens with fewer antibiotics. China has a bad reputation for using antibiotics, but Thailand claims that because it has spent millions improving the ponds and putting in liners, it uses no antibiotics.
Even the shrimp farmers agree that criticism has been good for the industry. It has caused them to upgrade and improve health and environmental standards—not only for the benefit of the consumers, but also for their workers. Although environmental and human-rights groups still protest, better environmental standards have been developed. The fleets of trawlers have remained much the same. But shrimp farming around the world has undergone rapid evolution over the past twenty years—not just in improving the health of the shrimp stocks, but by minimizing the industry’s impact on the environment and human rights. A Thai farm described in Time magazine as keeping its workers in slavery, in brutal conditions behind barbed-wire fences and working them round the clock, is no longer in business. The World Wildlife Fund and other organizations are pressuring the industry to develop and implement better standards—not just on paper, but on the ground.
In the past, farms reported low daily nitrogen levels being discharged into receiving bodies of water as they circulated seawater through their ponds. But then they failed to report the discharge of highly polluted water when the ponds were harvested. The shrimp would churn up the bottom mud, which was loaded with shrimp waste, uneaten food, and antibiotics. This effluent can kill larval and juvenile fish, shrimp, and crabs entering the estuaries. Under the new standards, participating farms promise to stop discharging harvest waters and will reduce the amount of wild-caught anchovies in formulated feeds to keep the oceans from being depleted. No loss of mangroves will be permitted. If such standards are implemented worldwide, consumers can be assured that they’re eating shrimp that have much less impact on the environment than in the past. Wal-Mart, the word’s largest retailer, just adopted a policy of purchasing only farm-raised shrimp from companies that are certified by the Global Aquaculture Alliance, which sets rigorous standards to protect the environment and produce healthier products. Slowly but surely, inefficient and badly built farms have gone out of business. They are being replaced by farms that are bending to global pressure, growing antibiotic-free shrimp, and no longer destroying mangrove swamps. Some companies are even planting new mangrove forests and attempting to restore the environment.
Although Asia and Madagascar prefer growing tiger prawns, vannamei is rapidly beating out the various local species because they are more disease resistant, grow faster, are less finicky feeders, and can better tolerate living in crowded ponds. Furthermore, it's easy to get vannamei brood stock. Today, hatcheries maintain captive stocks of pathogen-free vannamei, some of which have lineages going back thirty years. In a few short years vannamei became the main production species and is the leading farm-raised species in the Western Hemisphere, representing more than 99 percent of production.
Now, courtesy of worldwide aquaculture, certifications, and truth in seafood packaging laws, the name Litopenaeus (=Penaeus) vannamei is sometimes printed on cartons of imported farmed shrimp. Also, the name Vannamei occasionally appears on little plastic signs sticking up from beds of ice and shrimp in seafood cases in supermarkets. John Cheshire, the founder of Marifarms and a leader in world aquaculture, would declare the species to be “the most valuable invertebrate in the world.” When you see Vannamei on bags of shrimp in the supermarket, send kind thoughts to the memory of Pearl Lee Boone, who first described it.
Shrimp are being successfully raised in over 300,000 shrimp farms today. Aquaculture shrimp now account for almost half of the world’s production, with a worldwide market valued at $7 billion to the farm and over $20 billion in retail sales. Only 10 percent of those succulent crustaceans with their delicious pink-and-white flesh consumed in the United States come from domestic shrimp boats. The rest are grown on foreign shrimp farms or caught on foreign boats.
Sixty percent of the 4.1 pounds of shrimp that the average American eats today are Litopenaeus (=Penaeus) vannamei and the tiger prawn, Penaeus monodon, which are pond-raised in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Cheshire and his original investors lost everything, but he remained proud of the fact that Marifarms’ efforts resulted in today’s $20 billion worldwide shrimp-farming industry.
Shrimp farms produce no great adventures. There are no storms at sea or boats going down in waters seething with sharks. In the book, Forrest Gump was a shrimp farmer, but in the movie he was a “shrimping-boat captain.” In the industry publication Shrimp News, author Winston Groom explained why. “Shrimp farming is like watching grass grow, whereas if you’ve got a shrimp boat, you’ve got motion and action, and that’s what movies are all about. That’s why they call them movies.”
Rod McNeil, a biologist who spent a lifetime growing shrimp around the world, found a way to pass the time. He spent many hours on the bottom of shrimp ponds to see what the crustaceans were up to and described it to Bob Rosenberry in Shrimp News:
“Suddenly as I lie motionless on the bottom of the pond, a troop of thousands of shrimp approaches...looking for food. They move at a pretty good clip, with the very largest shrimp at the head of the troop and the smallest shrimp at the back, or not really with the troop at all. They move together somewhat the way a school of fish moves, in unison. When threatened by a predator, they scatter the same way a school of fish scatters, confusing the predators and making it difficult for them to zero in on individual animals.
“The troop is shaped like a teardrop, with the bulbous portion forming the leading edge, and the biggest shrimp across its front, then tapering off to the smaller shrimp at the rear.... It’s kind of scary when you’re lying on the bottom and watching them come toward you. Lying motionless and silent on the bottom, I watch their approach, and their reaction to me. When they spot me, all their antennae go up. I move toward them; the big shrimp on the leading edge of the troop take a head-high posture and keep an eye on me. I don’t move in any closer than a meter and a half. They freeze, watch me for thirty or forty seconds, and then troop right over the top of me. I dive with a wetsuit, but my hands and head are exposed, and they nibble on the skin, pinch it here and there, trying to figure out how to eat it.
“There’s a very strong preference for natural foods, particularly at night, when shrimp become solo hunters. During the day, when they’re trooping around the pond, their antennae are swept back along their sides. When the antennae lock on to a food source, they point directly at it and sometimes twitch. They can sense the extremely small electrical fields generated by the animals that live in the pond bottom. When they locate something, they move their antennae over the spot and then start digging. It’s tough to see what they pull out of the bottom because they tear it apart so quickly. They’re vicious little critters.
“When they arrive (at the feeding tray) it’s absolute mayhem. I’m typically two or three feet away, lying flat on the bottom, and it’s actually scary. The big shrimp at the head of the troop get there first and swarm over the feed. As the smaller shrimp arrive, they clamber on top of the big shrimp and before you know it, the tray is covered with five or six layers of shrimp. The big ones on the bottom attempt to throw anything smaller than themselves off the tray. A shrimp’s life is always on the move, always eating.”
Meanwhile, American shrimpers urge consumers to boycott farmed shrimp and eat the wild-caught product. When the venerable Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia modified the Tariff Act of 1930 and pushed his Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act (CDSOA) through Congress to help the ailing steel industry, he inadvertently issued a license to steal. Attorneys and lobbyists for the shrimp industry claimed that shrimp-farming nations were unfairly subsidizing shrimp farmers by building hatcheries and farms so that they could sell their products at below market prices in the United States. Before his amendment was repealed, Senator Byrd made it possible for American shrimpers to collect big cash rewards from offending countries by claiming they were economically injured.
This created an $800 million gold rush over a two-year period, reminiscent of the California gold rush of 1847 and the bank bailouts of 2008. The hastily formed Southern Shrimp Alliance petitioned the U.S. Department of Commerce to file suit in the World Trade Organization court against six major farmed-shrimp-exporting countries: Brazil, China, Ecuador, India, Thailand, and Vietnam. The Southern Shrimp Alliance told the World Trade Organization, “There are too many people’s livelihood at risk and too many communities in the Gulf Coast and Southeast Atlantic facing ruin to ignore the devastation caused by unfair trade. This industry cannot be sacrificed for empty promises that our communities will, at some indeterminable point in the future, enjoy the benefits of free trade.”
Exporting countries argued that it wasn’t a matter of illegal subsidies. They were selling shrimp cheaper because they were more efficient, had lower labor and fuel costs than trawlers, and produced a better, more reliable product that was much in demand. The tropical shrimp farms, they said, enabled foreign producers to harvest more shrimp than the ocean provided and to do so more efficiently. Hence, they could sell their shrimp at a lower price. If import tariffs were put in place, the price of shrimp could increase by 44 percent in the U.S.
The World Trade Organization agreed that the shrimpers could claim damages. The Southern Shrimp Alliance was awarded duties that ranged from 7.6 percent from Ecuador to 112 percent from China and India. U.S. Customs would collect the money from these governments and give it directly to the offended industry. The Southern Shrimp Association said that the additions were merely “a step in the right direction” and asked for additional tariffs of up to 200 percent.
The money that U.S. Customs collected was to be used to help the shrimpers and their infrastructure to keep them from going out of business. Most of the personnel of the U.S. Customs Service had never seen a shrimp trawler and suddenly had to decide who was eligible to receive the funds. How does one pay the owners of over ten thousand shrimp boats that were scattered from North Carolina to Texas?
They didn’t. Instead, they gave $102 million worth of import tariffs that they collected from Brazil, China, Ecuador, India, Thailand, and Vietnam in 2005 to lobbyists, attorneys, and industry reps of the Southern Shrimp Alliance who brought trade actions and filed lawsuits. You had to be a member of the organization to get on the payout list. Most of the shrimpers got only a pittance, an average of $8,000 to $20,000. The money was tied to their production of the previous year. If a shrimper had a bad season, his boat broke down, or the weather was too rough to work, he didn’t get much.
Jim Lycett, a Carrabelle shrimper who was a member of the SSA, complained, “There was no oversight by the government. The money went to the fish houses, who weren’t impacted like we were. I have three boats, and in two and a half years, with well-documented receipts, all I got was $15,000—chump change! The big corporations that own hundreds of boats grabbed most of the money.” Everybody sued everybody, and claims of fraud were more common than shrimp on the seafloor.