increased supply of animal protein to the human race.”
It was a lovely thought. A Blue Revolution. But his success
fueled a global grab in which protein and profits flowed one
way—north toward the moneyed. One year after his speech, a
group of Japanese businessmen bought Fujinaga’s technology,
won a U.S. patent, and approached DuPont for money. DuPont
declined, but two o;cials who heard the pitch, Paul Bente and
John Rutledge Cheshire, were so excited they quit their jobs, put
up $200,000 of Cheshire’s family money, and opened Marifarms
in a bay near Panama City, Florida.
Aided by research at the U.S. lab in Galveston, Marifarms
harvested a disappointing six thousand pounds in 1970, according to Cheshire’s book, Memoir of a Shrimp Farmer. The same
year, another venture, Sea Farms, was digging canals in a Florida
key to grow shrimp.
Because of environmental issues—Marifarms scooped up
pregnant white shrimp and confined them in a public bay, while
Sea Farms flew in nonindigenous shrimp from Central America,
a practice Florida soon prohibited—shrimp farming moved
south. Supported by USAID, World Bank loans, and willing
developing-world o;cials, corporate giants United Fruit,
Armour, Conagra, and Ralston Purina launched shrimp farms in
Honduras, Brazil, Panama, and Ecuador, according to oral histories collected by Bob Rosenberry of Shrimp News International.
Learning as they went, the farmed-shrimp industry laid waste to
mangroves, fishing communities, and ecosystems. The word
“plundering” comes to mind.
A shrimp farm is a saltwater feedlot. There can be as many as
170,000 shrimp larvae in a 1-acre pond that is 1 to 2 meters deep.
So-called intensive ponds can yield 6,000 to 18,000 pounds of
shrimp in that acre in 3 to 6 months. (A good wheat yield is
3,600 pounds per acre.) Because of this density, the waste they
swim in, and their susceptibility to disease, most farmed shrimp
are treated with antibiotics, only some of them legal in the U.S.
A wide array of poisons is used to kill unwanted sea life and
cleanse ponds for reuse, creating what Public Citizen calls a
“chemical cocktail.” In random sampling of imported shrimp,
health o;cials in the U.S., Japan, and the European Union have
found chloramphenicol, a dangerous antibiotic banned in food.
The industry acknowledges that 5 percent of the world’s
mangroves, hundreds of thousands of acres, have been
destroyed creating shrimp ponds. In some estuaries 80 percent
of the mangroves are gone. A commons was privatized, ruining
artisanal fishing and driving indigenous fishermen to work raising shrimp. By removing the thick coastal barrier of trees, shrimp
farms have undoubtedly aggravated damage from hurricanes and
tsunamis. And salt intrusion has sterilized once-fertile estuaries.
Even in the best-run farms, two to four pounds of sea life is
caught and ground up as feed for every pound of shrimp raised.
Mortality rates of 30 percent are common. The dead shrimp,
shrimp excrement, and chemical additives are often flushed into
coastal waters.
By the mid 1970s, farmed shrimp from South and Central
America, at less than half the cost of Gulf shrimp, began arriving
at Red Lobster restaurants—and everywhere else. All-you-can-eat
shrimp dinners became a standard, filling both waistlines and
Red Lobster’s co=ers. That box of shrimp I retrieved from the
dumpster cost $2.50 a pound, and sold, in my case, for $25 a
pound, a markup that bettered the beer’s.
Quietly, farmed shrimp took over the market, its source hidden behind the motif of a picturesque but actually sinking
shrimp fleet. By 1980, half of America’s shrimp consumption
came from foreign farms. By 2001, shrimp passed canned tuna
as America’s favorite seafood. Today, 90 percent of our shrimp—
more than 1 billion pounds a year—come from foreign farms.
Virtually any restaurant chain, from Captain D’s to Red Lobster,
serves farmed shrimp. Foreign farmed shrimp was peddled for
years by vendors at the National Shrimp Festival in Alabama—
until they were caught—and at happy hour for the Gulf of
Mexico Fishery Management Council meeting in Birmingham,
Alabama, in March 2005, where government o;cials finalized a
ten-year freeze on twenty-seven hundred shrimp boat licenses.
The sight of government biologists slurping Vietnamese shrimp
after reining in American shrimpers was an irony sharper than
