Sheila Keating, The Times 5 Jan 08;
Thinking of a little seafood after all the excesses of Christmas?
Before you buy those big juicy-looking tiger prawns, ask a few questions about where they have come from.
The Marine Conservation Society’s advice is to choose northern coldwater prawns from sustainable sources instead of pot-caught prawns, which involve trawling the oceans and discarding a shocking 10kg of by-catch (other fish) for every kilo of prawns.
Over the past 30 years there has been an explosion of tiger-prawn farming in places such as Bangladesh, Honduras, India and Thailand, but these, too, are fraught with problems.
In order to create the farms, thousands of miles of coastal mangrove forests have been destroyed, and with them the ecosystem and fishing communities they support. The mangrove swamps act as buffers between the land and sea, and also serve as nurseries for juvenile fish. “One third of South-East Asian fish landed are dependent on mangroves during their life cycle,” says Steve Trent, director of the Environmental Justice Foundation (www.ejfoundation.org).
The foundation campaigns for sustainable, ethically produced prawns, and in particular highlights the social and labour problems that have sometimes ensued from the boom in farming, not to mention issues of pollution, over-use of chemicals and antibiotics, and the need to catch even more wild fish for feed – further depleting the seas.
What can we do to change things?
“As environmentalists, it would be easy to tell people, ‘Just say no,’” says Trent. “On the other hand, we are talking about an industry that is worth something in the region of £20 billion, so what would happen to the livelihood of all the people involved if the world boycotted farmed prawns?
The truth is that it is perfectly possible to farm prawns ethically and sustainably, so we are trying to encourage people to make a difference by asking questions and telling supermarkets that they only want prawns that have been farmed in an environmentally and socially acceptable way.
Waitrose, for example, has made a real and commendable effort to source sustainable fish and shellfish across the board.”
The kind of farms we should support, says Trent, are “not set in the intertidal zone, haven’t involved the clearing of mangroves and operate closed systems, where pollutants can’t come in or go out. They are organic, or at least moving towards using fewer chemicals and antibiotics, aren’t squeezing people off their land, and are trading fairly in terms of the local community.”
The problem, he admits, is how to identify prawns from such systems. “There is still no adequate labelling system, so it is really down to us to ask questions.”
Are there any other alternatives?
It could be that langoustines, also known as Dublin Bay prawns, are set to be the new tiger prawns. According to Seafish, UK sales have grown year on year by 100 per cent. What is more, they are now being fished from sustainable stocks in Scotland.
