Go Blue! Seafood Sustainability

Farm Raised White & Tiger Shrimp Advancing along Sea Port’s

 Go Blue! Seafood Sustainability Spectrums

Four years ago, Sea Port conducted sustainability assessments for both Farm Raised White & Tiger Shrimp in order to reveal the existing and potential environmental impacts and risks that were associated with producing these delicacies for human consumption.  The EMS disease crisis of the past 4-6 years, while creating a great setback in the production of farmed shrimp, has now created a positive wave of new aquaculture technologies and practices.  As a result, there has occurred an overall improvement in the sustainable husbandry of shrimp on a global basis. To celebrate this, Sea Port is now advancing Farm Raised White and Tiger Shrimp forward along their respective

 Go Blue! Seafood Sustainability Spectrums.

Rationale:

•      There is now more of a universal adherence to established best aquaculture practices as well as new practices such as using feed and both broodstock and nursery stocks that are disease free or resistant, maintaining cleaner pond bottoms, monitoring water quality in terms of striving for a healthy microbial balance that discourages the emergence of pathogenic opportunists, and implementing polyculture schemes using finfish species such as tilapia that complement water quality maintenance.  These advances and others have greatly reduced the negative environmental impacts associated with shrimp aquaculture in terms of protecting the surrounding ecosystems from farm effluents and conserving their productive natural resources that are used as farm inputs.  In addition, the growth in sustainable aquaculture certification schemes such as BAP, ASC, and GlobalG.A.P. have collectively helped drive these and other best practices toward greatly improving environmental and socioeconomic sustainability.

•      There are now efforts to manage regional shrimp farms in relationship to their proximity and sharing of hydrologic systems so that EMS or any other emerging disease problems such as EHP can be managed better in terms of preventing their spread to other farms and to the surrounding ecosystems.

•      Lastly, on the high-tech side, there are now available on-site diagnostic tools for both EMS & EHP that will enable near real-time detection of these disease agents in feeds, water, shrimp, and other substrates and this will greatly improve disease management.

From the major adversity caused by EMS, there has arisen a stronger and more mature global shrimp farming industry.  However, this aquaculture sector is still only in its infancy (please see Sea Port EMS Blog of 2013) and as new diseases inevitably emerge in the future, the lessons learned from EMS and EHP will greatly help mitigate their negative impacts to this industry that produces true seafood delicacies.  Please note and celebrate the advancement of the sustainability spectrum needles for both Farm Raised White and Tiger Shrimp:

Please continue to enjoy shrimp, American’s favorite seafood and stay tuned for future sustainability updates.

Go Blue! For Our Environment – For Sustainability – For Our Health

Sincerely,

David Glaubke,

Director of Sustainability Initiatives – Sea Port Products Corp.