India’s Shrimp: Feeding Rich Countries, Starving Small Fishers 2021 Right to Food and Nutrition Watch Video Series
Frogmore stew. Polpette de gamberi. Gambas al ajillo. Ebu furi. Bisque. What’s common in them? You guessed it right. All these dishes contain shrimp, one of the world’s most commonly traded seafood largely produced in poor nations and mostly consumed in rich countries.
In India, the world’s hunger for shrimp drove the country in the 1980s to come up with policies that would promote shrimp export. This resulted in India’s expansion of its shrimp farming area to 160,000 hectares and its yearly production capacity to 800,000 metric tons.
After four decades, India was able to outpace Thailand, Ecuador, and Indonesia as the world’s top exporter, cornering the biggest markets for shrimp led by the U.S., China, Japan, and some countries in Europe.
But India’s success in feeding the world with its shrimp is just one side of the story. The other side — often untold by the government, the business sector, and the international financial institutions that pushed the country to become a top seafood exporter — is about the hunger that this growth caused among India’s small fishing communities.
In this video,* Jones Spartegus of the National Fishworkers Forum, discusses the development of the commercial fishing sector, including the shrimp farming sector in India. He shares how the country’s starving and lowly paid marine fishers have been trapped into supplying the world’s demand for seafood while traditional fishers got marginalized through the occupation of coastal land and oceans by big corporate entities.
“(These) corporates…first transformed the boats (for commercial fishing), then they occupied coastal land, and now they are occupying the sea space…This is clear cut marginalization… subjugation…and dispossession of the rights of traditional fishers…This is a false solution to hunger,” says Spartegus.
*The video is part of the Oct. 13, 2021 online seminar, Not Our Menu: False Solution to Hunger and Malnutrition, organized by the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition.
**Subtitles in English and other languages are available. Click the CC icon at the bottom of the YouTube video.
HUNGRY FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THIS ISSUE?
Read “Aquaculture, Financialization, and Impacts on Small-scale Fishing Communities” written by Carsten Pedersen and Yifang Tang via this link: https://www.righttofoodandnutrition.org/aquaculture-financialization-and-impacts-small-scale-fishing-communities
The article is part of the 2021 edition of the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch, “Not Our Menu: False Solutions to Hunger and Malnutrition.” Read the other articles vis this link: https://www.righttofoodandnutrition.org/not-our-menu-false-solutions-hunger-and-malnutrition
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