June 05, 2025

Should The “Local Shrimp” You Buy Come From 8,000 Miles Away?

2 minutes

Let’s say you like shrimp. Whether you go for a chain restaurant’s happy hour shrimp boil or a pricey plate of “shrimp à la grandioso” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort – a good question to ask is: Where do they get their shrimp?

Even if the restaurant has an ocean view and a shrimp boat out front, chances are its crustaceans come from industrial aquaculture farms thousands of miles away in India, Ecuador, Vietnam and Indonesia. Astonishingly, our country now imports 94 percent of the shrimp we eat!

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Astonishing, because our oceans have an abundance of top-quality shrimp, and we are blessed with highly-skilled shrimping families. Worse, those foreign industrial operations, financed by Wall Street and global profiteers, are infamous for using forced labor, banned antibiotics, and destructive environmental methods. Then they dump their grossly-cheap product into the US market, pushing out our superior-quality domestic product and devastating entire shrimping communities.

Yet, restaurant and supermarket prices for shrimp are at historic highs, with no disclosure to us consumers of where the product is from. The import industry effectively bribes lawmakers to avoid exposing, much less punishing, this multibillion-dollar swindle of American producers and eaters alike. The bait-and-switch conspiracy is now so pervasive that at last year’s National Shrimp Festival, four out of five vendors were – shhhh – quietly serving industrially-raised imported shrimp.

Of course, corporations have no conscience, but our tough-on-crime political leaders are so pusillanimous that they won’t even stand up for their own local shrimpers. A recent Louisiana law, for example, “boldly” requires restaurants to disclose if they’re peddling imported shrimp. But, the legislature meekly provided no penalty if violators ignore the law. So… they do.

For information on real reform, connect with SanAntonioBayWaterKeeper.org.