Justice to Environmental Pollution of Shrimp Industry (Part 2)

Shrimp farming in Thailand is embedding in a supply chain system that involves shrimps being raised in farms, that are fed on domestically manufactured shrimp feed produced from fishmeal factories, that purchase small, left over fish from fishing vessels. Farmed shrimps rely on technological advancements, using ultra-intensive systems that produces greater yields, coupled with much higher levels of inputs, including antibiotics, feed and pesticides, than lower intensity systems. In order to gain higher profits, Thai shrimp industry adopted an  intensification of shrimp farming to meet the increasing global demand. This increase in production leads to the development focus that drives Thai shrimp industry to go beyond their means by commodifying nature at the expense of exploiting the environment. With more land clearance for growth and intensification of shrimp farms, it has resulted in mangrove destruction, water pollution as pesticides are used in shrimp farming process, heavily pouting and contaminating the waters. This excessive, uncontrolled growth of Thai shrimp farming, lead to an outbreak of EMS (Early Mortality Sydrome), casing a sharp reductions in production. This illustrates how the attempt to expand in production has the ability to result in an unintended consequence that still suffers the effects of EMS until today, with Thailand still recovering in terms of production and export volume (ILO, 2015). Thus shrimp aquaculture in particular has a very grim reputation, with cases of harvesting disease-ridden crustaceans from antibiotic-filled swamps amid the dead mangroves (Clark, 2019).  On top of that, these aquaculture produces pollutants that endangers the surrounding environment and threatening the existence of its special species.

Produce from shrimp farms are then traded in the vast Samut Sakhon seafood market, where it is sold on to pre-processing factories for first round of shrimp production. The nature of pre-processing factories are often considered dangerous, dirt and difficult (Adams, 2015), with workers often being underpaid. These dire working conditions apparent in the Thai shrimp industry have desensitised many, to the extent that some migrants are robbed to motivate them to work on fishing boats, selling their lives to the sea with almost no opportunity of returning. These workers are being reduced to mere “commodities”, being bought, sold, transported and resold. The capitalist economic context attached to the human bodies, justify Castree notion of nature as the human body, a process of theoretical abstraction that one can separate the body out as a physical thing from the identities and personalities of the people who “inhabit” it (Castree, 2003). On top of that, the industry supports child labour, mainly in small businesses and in areas with minimal training required. These children are ages between 5 and 17, with a percentage of them working in conditions classified as hazardous (ILO 2013: 6). These working conditions are especially harmful to the children, with repeated injuries, irregulated break times, many work nights shifts during wee hours and most of the children do not attend school (Tang 2013:33).