So Naomi Hussain I told you prawns were ruining the environment, but didn't know why. Well I found out, here is a blog about it:
Prawns were once considered a luxury food item much like lobster, they were sought after and much harder to come by. Nowadays on walking into a local supermarket you'll find a variety of the produce cheap as chips. To feed our desire for a cheap source of a yummy product, industrialised shrimp farming has become highly destructive to the environment as thousands of hectares of mangrove forests are being destroyed to set up shrimp farms.
Mangroves are among the most productive ecosystems on the planet and support a great variety of marine life. However, mangroves are being cleared to make way for prawn farms. 40% of world mangrove loss has been attributed to shrimp farming. When mangroves are destroyed, farmers find their catches of other fish collapse. As so many pesticides are poured into the mangroves before the prawn larvae are grown.
In Ecuador 80% of the population have lost their main source of food because of the destruction of mangroves to create higher yields. Whats more as the farms pump waste water into canals, 74% of fishermen in Sri Lanka no longer have access to drinking water. In Vietnam shrimp farming is polluting the soils, trees and water so greatly it will be their last form of agriculture.
Furthermore prawns are carnivorous, and the feed required to raise them (which is made of various fish oils) is double the weight of the prawn produced which in itself is depleting wild stocks of fish.
This being said not all prawns are farmed in this way...
When buying prawns it is best to choose cold water ones from the Arctic Ocean and the cold parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Canada.
Avoid prawns farmed from Thailand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Vietnam (These will be the cheaper ones). Shockingly unfarmed prawns are no better the vast majority are trawled, a process that kills an estimated 150,000 turtles annually.
