World Shrimp Farming 2002

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Conceived in the good old days of 1997–1999, when shrimp prices were high, a new wave of shrimp farms came online in early 2000. Suddenly, Vietnam and Brazil became major exporters of farmed shrimp. India produced big crops. Shrimp farmers in Taiwan and China made huge production comebacks. Mexico flexed its muscles. And all the while Thailand never lost its grip on the title of the world’s leading producer of farmed shrimp.

By the spring of 2000, the world had farmed shrimp coming out of its ears. Supply raced ahead of demand, the market broke, and three years of good shrimp prices came to an end. From March 2000 to September 2001, wholesale shrimp prices dropped 35%. After the September 11, 2001, attack on America, they dropped to five-year lows.

To make a bad situation worse, in late 2001 and early 2002, an antibiotic scare hit the industry when Germany discovered the antibiotic chloramphenicol in farmed shrimp from Asia. Can you handle 26 pages on chloramphenicol? Day-by-day. Chapter one!

The year ends with commercial shrimp fishermen in the United States accusing sixteen countries of dumping farm-raised shrimp on the USA market. I mixed the dumping story in with the chloramphenicol story. Dumping begins on page 17, February 26, 2002, and then comes back with a vengence on page 34, September 9, 2002.

Gone to the world’s press, that’s where. In August 2002, I subscribed to an electronic clipping service that searches the Internet on “shrimp farming,” expecting to pick up some hot news from somewhere out there. Instead, I was inundated with clippings attacking shrimp farming, mostly stuff that environmentalists—Greenpeace, Mangrove Action Project/Earth Island Institute, World Wildlife Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund (and a few thousand others)—get into the press or onto news sites. A lot of it is old stuff from the 1990s that just kind of recirculates through the environmental press. Gone to salmon farming a long time ago.

Penaeus vannamei, a marine shrimp native to the Pacific coasts of Central and South America from Mexico to Peru, is the most popular farmed species in the Western Hemisphere, probably accounting for 95% of production. Now, it’s becoming popular in Asia, and over the next two or three years, it could displace the giant tiger shrimp, P. monodon, as the most popular farmed species in the world. Vannamei has a lot going for it, and you’ll see references to it throughout this report.

Meanwhile, in sweeter waters, Macrobrachium rosenbergii, the giant freshwater prawn and its relatives, M. niponnese (China) and M. malcolmsonni (India), have clawed their way up the production ladder everywhere in the world, including the United States, where prawn farms outnumber shrimp farms ten to one! Everywhere in the southeastern United States and in places as far north as Ohio and Nebraska, small-scale, mom-and-pop operations do prawn farming American style, in half-acre ponds. Can they make it pay? Check out the USA section.

Accurate statistics on even the basic aspects of world shrimp farming do not exist. No one knows how much farm-raised shrimp is produced globally. Sprinkled throughout this report, especially in the country reports, I’ve included some production estimates that have appeared in the fisheries press over the last year—and many of the first person reports from shrimp farmers contain production estimates. Globally, in 2002, shrimp and prawn farmers produced an estimated one million metric tons of whole animals. Put the emphasis on estimated. Who knows?

On November 28, 2001, the Associated Press reported on the sad state of world fisheries statistics:

Catches from the world's oceans are severely declining, but the trend has been masked by China's practice of increasingly over reporting the amount of fish it lands each year.

A team of scientists based at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver found that global catches, which were thought to be increasing during the 1990s by 700 million pounds (315 million kilograms) of fish per year, actually have been decreasing by nearly 800 million pounds (360 million kilograms) of fish annually.

Reg Watson and Daniel Pauly, authors of the Canadian study, said: We are “dashing hopes that the sea can continue to meet our growing demand for fish.”

Just one entity, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, compiles global fisheries statistics, but it relies on voluntary reporting of catches from countries to estimate the number of fish in the seas.

Sources: 1. Seafood.com (page 262). Scientists report global fish decline masked by poor FAO data. John Sackton. November 28, 2001. 2. Associated Press, November 28, 2001. 3. Nature (the journal). Letters to Nature. Systematic distortions in world fisheries catch trends. Reg Watson (r.watson@fisheries.ubc.ca) and Daniel Pauly (University of British Columbia, Fisheries Centre, 2204 Main Mall, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada). November 29, 2001.

And drastically lower prices have not killed off the world’s shrimp farmers. Farmers have responded with new technologies, new management strategies and lower production costs. Brazil reports production costs of a dollar a pound! Some new, small, super-intensive farms in Panama say they can produce shrimp for $0.95 a pound. And China might be able to beat that! Who knows?

In 2001, according to the United States Department of Commerce, for the first time ever, Americans ate more shrimp than canned tuna. They ate a record 3.4 pounds of shrimp per person, an increase of nine percent over 2000. Consumption of other seafood dropped in 2001. Source: The Wave (page 263). Seafood consumption falls in 2001, but shrimp is now America's favorite: Canned tuna falls to second place. August 28, 2002.

Bob Rosenberry, November 27, 2002