Where do my prawns come from?

A wise course of action?
Fred Pearce, The Guardian 23 Apr 08;

Prawns are partly responsible for the present food crisis in Bangladesh, Vietnam and countries in South East Asia.

A quest to find out where the prawns in his London curry came from took Fred Pearce all the way to Bangladesh - but is was not so much the food miles that bothered him as the social dilemma he unearthed

It was a bit quixotic, I know. But I wanted to find out where the prawns in my Saturday night curry came from. That is how I ended up standing beside a pond in the blazing sun in south-west Bangladesh with Amal as he pulled one of the first prawns of the new season from his pond - and told me about a prawn mafia that lies between this patch of former mangrove swamp and my plate.

My journey to meet Amal was just one of dozens that I took to trace my global footprint by finding out where the cotton in my shirt comes from, the coffee in my mug, the computer on my desk. To discover who grows or mines or makes my stuff. And where my waste and recycling really ends up.

For the prawn leg, my investigation began in Manchester with Iqbal Ahmed, known among Britain's Bangladeshi community as Mr Prawn. Ahmed first introduced black tiger prawns to Britain in the 1980s. They made him rich, and made Manchester - the home of the chip butty - the unlikely prawn capital of Europe.

Ahmed's company, Seamark, supplies tiger prawns to thousands of curry houses and pubs across Britain. Most are bred in ponds dug in thousands of square kilometres of former mangrove swamps on the delta of the river Ganges. In the past two decades, big landlords have turned Bangladesh into one of the world's largest producers of tiger prawns.

This is bad ecologically, but it is also bad socially. Meeting Amal, I collided with a world of poverty, debt dependency, usurious middlemen and ruthless gangs, known locally as musclemen, paid by the big landlords to keep people like Amal in check, or throw them off their land. One gang was threatening to stop water from the river reaching Amal's pond unless he paid a fat bribe.

The local papers reported killings by the musclemen. But the police are often in cahoots, and investigating who is behind this quiet terror is dangerous. In 10 years, 14 news reporters have been murdered in the area for probing too deeply.

The economics, too, is breathtaking. Amal gets just pennies for raising prawns that turn up on my plate in London for £9.95. Why? Because between his pond and the processing plant 10km away in Khulna, those prawns pass through no fewer than seven sets of middlemen, each taking a cut. John Vidal

Back in Britain, Ahmed is not party to any of this. He simply buys the prawns delivered to him. But several attempts have been made by NGOs in Britain, the US and Bangladesh to root out the corruption by setting up a system of certifying fairly traded and sustainably grown prawns. And they have attempted to recruit Ahmed to their cause. He told me they were designed to extract money from him: "I'd have to pay for certification, but what would I get in return?"

Sustainable sourcing

Yet Ahmed clearly values his reputation in Britain. When we met, he was part of a panel of industrialists assembled by the British government to promote sustainable sourcing in the food industry. The declared aim was to "double the amount of food goods in supermarkets covered by ethical trading schemes".

But the story of Amal and Ahmed is just one in a complex world of globalised production and distribution that maintains us all. Early on in my research, I met a scientist who reckoned that the average household in Britain has so many devices and such a variety of food and clothing that to produce the same lifestyle in Roman times would have required 6,000 slaves.

His point was that we now rely on machines and cheap energy to do the things servants would once have done for an elite while the rest of us went without. But this modern lifestyle still requires many servants, spread across the world. And there are ecological consequences; the cheap energy is warming our climate.

I am not opposed to globalisation. Instinctively, I am in favour of it - but democratised and made transparent and accountable. And, despite uncovering horrors in my researches, I stand by that.

Jacob Musyoki, who I visited on his farm in the Machakos district of Kenya, grows green beans that are air-freighted to Britain for sale in supermarkets. A lot of environmentalists want us to boycott them because of the CO2 emissions from the nightly flights from Nairobi. But that would be bad news for Musyoki, who makes a much better living growing beans for consumption in Britain than he did when his only markets were local. He has enough money for a TV. He is a citizen of the world and is proud his kids can now stay in school.

Do we really want to cut emissions by pulling the plug on Musyoki? He is not responsible for global warming. We are. Perhaps we should do something to cut our carbon emissions that inconveniences us, rather than wrecks his life. Why not keep buying the beans, but take the bus to the supermarket instead of driving?

In Bangladesh, I visited women sweatshop workers paid 5p an hour, but who told me not to boycott their clothes because this was freedom from a life of rural servitude. I met coffee growers angry about "fair trade", and Chinese paper recyclers appalled at the quality of British "rubbish" they received. I was constantly tugged between what seemed ecologically right and what seemed socially right. Who said sustainable development was simple?

Technical fixes

I should confess that I flew 180,000km while researching. That is 22 tonnes of CO2 emissions. Was it worth it? That's up to the readers of the book that came out of it. But what struck me repeatedly was that - with air travel probably the largest exception - there are many off-the-shelf technical fixes for many environmental problems, including climate change: wind and solar power; cars that run on hydrogen or plug into the mains.

But what is more fearful in the coming decades is not so much an ecological apocalypse as a social one. One in which Amal continues to be exploited. In which we forget our declarations to help Africa through "trade not aid", and send Musyoki back to his subsistence farming. In which we end up saving the planet - and starving the poor.

· Fred Pearce's book, Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Travels to Find Where My Stuff Comes From, is published by Eden Project Books, price £12.99. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.
Flooding the market

Prawns are partly responsible for the present food crisis in Bangladesh, Vietnam and countries in South East Asia. During the 1980s, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund encouraged many poor countries to export to get foreign currency, and Bangladesh's government was helped by the bank to develop a new prawn industry.

It now employs tens of thousands of people, but has removed more than half a million acres from staple food production, made hundreds of thousands of people landless, forced people into the slums and is an ecological disaster.

Prawn farming began with people trapping tidal waters in enclosures known as "gher" where no feed, fertilisers or other inputs were applied. But it quickly became an intensive industry with powerful prawn farmers building hundreds of miles of embankments and destroying mangrove forests.

Traditional farmers have had little choice but to lease or sell their land to prawn entrepreneurs. Anyone who refuses is liable to have their crops ruined, after groups - often armed - flood their fields with salt water.

The farming has led to permanent waterlogging over large areas and increased saline intrusion, affecting thousands of other farmers. In many prawn farming areas, local communities now keep fewer domestic animals and grow fewer fruit trees. John Vidal