Thailand has long been the face of the shrimp industry’s troubled track record. A series of investigations between 2014 and 2015, including bombshell reporting from The Guardian and The Associated Press, revealed that slavery and other labor abuses were widespread in processing facilities and fishing operations that provided feed to shrimp farms, leading governments to issue warnings and many companies to end relationships with Thai suppliers. As the Thai industry’s reputation was ravaged by these allegations, and poor overall aquaculture practices put its shrimp stocks under constant threat of disease, the country made a pledge to clean up its human rights performance — and its shrimp farms.
Shrimp is by far the most popular seafood in the U.S., and the U.S. is the largest shrimp importer in the world; more than 90% of the shrimp we eat is farmed overseas. So when costs of Thai farmed seafood inevitably went up, the U.S. began looking elsewhere to satisfy its demand for cheap product. As Nathan Rickard, a lawyer for the Southern Shrimp Alliance, explained on a 2022 episode of “What You’re Eating,” the longstanding “Thai dominance” had in fact already been supplanted by imports from a somewhat unlikely country: India, previously a rather minor player. Its market share was only continuing to grow. “What’s our guarantee that the same thing that we were concerned about in Thailand isn’t happening with India?” he wondered.
