Strategies for helping farmed shrimp

By Hannah McKay🔸, Elisa Autric, Daniela Waldhorn, William McAuliffe, Rethink Priorities @ 2024-11-16T10:49 (+46)

Who this report is for and how to access it

Only a handful of animal advocacy organizations have programs aimed specifically at preventing the exploitation of farmed shrimp. We wrote this report to provide practical guidance about how to help shrimp on farms. This public summary provides an overview of the current state of shrimp farming and potential paths forward. For a deeper dive, the full 70+ page report offers concrete, strategic recommendations and more detailed insights. The full report will be most useful for animal advocacy groups, funders, and those interested in how best to help shrimp. If you would like access to the full report, please complete this Google form.

Summary

Shrimp production: industry numbers, trends, and practices

Figure 1: Estimated numbers of farmed shrimp, insects, fishes, and chickens alive on farms at any time. Data from Waldhorn and Autric (2023)
Figure 2: Per capita shrimp supply vs per capita GDP. Note both axes are logarithmic. Supply data from own analysis of FAO (2024) data for 2022, and GDP data from Our World in Data’s analysis of seafood consumption and GDP.

Shrimp advocacy: current state, opportunities, and bottlenecks

If you would like to access the full report, which includes concrete recommendations, please request access using this Google form. Requests will usually be evaluated within 24 hours.

If you have any questions or would like further clarification on specific points, please feel free to reach out to hannah@rethinkpriorities.org. Additionally, if you're interested in a private presentation tailored to your organization, please let us know by indicating your interest here.


MichaelStJules @ 2024-11-17T19:27 (+12)
  • Animals like fish are caught and farmed to feed farmed shrimp, increasing the negative welfare effects of shrimp farming

(...)

  • Develop alternative foods that taste like shrimp to help reduce demand for farmed shrimp

FWIW, given the moral ambiguity of fishing, the catch of wild animals for (shrimp) feed could be good overall for wild (aquatic) animals, instead of bad.

This and the effects of shrimp feed (crop) production on terrestrial wild animals make me somewhat inclined not to try to shift shrimp consumption towards plant-based food (substitutes or general reduction). My best guess is that crop production tends to decrease wild arthropod populations (Attwood et al., 2008, tables 3 and 4; Newbold et al., 2015), and animal products tend to decrease wild terrestrial arthropod populations more than plant-based products due to greater land use for crops per calorie or kg of protein (e.g. Our World in Data, based on Poore & Nemecek, 2018), so shifting towards plant-based would be bad for wild terrestrial arthropods, if they have bad lives or you're suffering-focused.

However, farmed shrimp/prawns may use less land than plant-based foods per gram of protein, so maybe shifting away from them would be good by reducing wild terrestrial arthropod populations, too. This is something I'd like to look more into. I imagine land use for shrimp/prawns is only so low according to these estimates because they're assuming a high rate of wild aquatic ingredients (whose impacts are morally ambiguous!). You probably can't get lower land use than tofu per kg of protein by feeding shrimp almost entirely soy and grains, because of higher losses in feed conversion than in soy processing into tofu (and tofu having similar or less land use than other feed ingredients per kg of protein).

Vasco Grilo🔸 @ 2024-11-20T14:57 (+2)

Thanks for sharing.

If you would like access to the full report, please complete this Google form.

I would be curious to know why you have decided to keep the full report private.

Nice graph! How can shrimp supply per capita be negative? Are you showing values relative to the mean across countries?