Stop buying farmed shrimp and start asking where your's is coming from

I want to apologize before hand for my last blog. I tried to get a video on here, but I'm not the most technologically smart person and have failed. At the end my rant I'll give the link to the website though and I hope you take a look at it.

So many of us love shrimp and it shows. Almost everywhere one can go out to eat there will be at least one shrimp dish. Now most of us do not think twice where our shrimp comes from, but for those of us who do know how we get shrimp, it makes it difficult to eat it. I took an environmental health class at Seattle Central Community College a few years ago and learned a little about shrimp farming and since then I have eaten shrimp maybe 5 times, maybe.

Shrimp farming is a lot like other types of fish/animal farming. It packs tons of shrimp into close quarters, uses an outrageous amount of water, pollutes the surrounding environment and can have devastating effects on the human populations around it. The video I wanted to post on this blog is by the Environmental Justice Foundation. It takes a look at shrimp farming in different parts of the world from Southeast Asia to South America. People are promised jobs when the shrimp companies come in, but many times outsiders are hired instead of locals. The local suppy of water is used to fill vast ponds for the shrimp to live in. THese ponds are man made and the ecosystems that were there before them are destroyed. Shrimp farms use a gross amount out antibiotics on the shrimp so they do not get disease from living in their own waste water and living so close to one another. These antibiotics stay in the shrimp for humans to ingest and also run off with the drainage water. In the video a local crabber is interviewed and he talks about before a shrimp farm was put near his village he used to get four times the amount of crab he gets today. These are just some of the impacts that shrimp farm have on people on the environment.

So what can we do. Well you can decide not to eat shrimp. If you can't do that try to find sustainably caught shrimp, even shrimp trolling boats can ruin the environments the shrimps live in. Look for pot caught shrimp. Share this videos with others so we can take a stand and stop shrimp farming.

Here is the link to the video.
http://www.ejfoundation.org/page211.html