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At my tavern this morning, I was talking to my friend, Chuck, who recently retired from Halliburton. Full-blooded American Indian, he had worked all over the world, beginning with the Alaska pipeline, and filling in with Vietnam, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Haiti, to name a few
"What about this BP Gulf oil spill?" I asked, after serving a Bud bottle.
"They could have stopped it the first day," he scoffed. He was getting up in years, and shaky from Parkinson's, likely agent orange, the Halliburton part-of-the-job-cost-of-doing-business.
"What?" I asked incredulously. "Are you saying they did it on purpose?"
"They're mad at Mexico," he said. "They're killing the shrimp industry."
"What about US shrimpers?"
"Follow the money," he said. Then he started talking deep-sea-rig jingo, washed down with beer, and big construction cynicism, that was beyond my knowledge, or dictionary of doomsday dialect.
Conspiracy theories soon swirled in my mind like littoral currents in a nor-westerner. I did some Wiki research: the US banned wild shrimp harvests from Mexico on April 20, 2010 ostensibly because Mexico's trawls lack protection for endangered sea turtles.
But why flood the Gulf with oil and also destroy US shrimpers? The answer, of course, is that most shrimp are raised on shrimp farms or hatcheries; 90 percent of all shrimp consumed in the US comes from notorious ecologically disastrous farms in Asia. Of the remaining 10 percent of domestic wild shrimp, 75 percent comes from the Gulf. Global production of farmed shrimp reached more than 1.6 metric tons in 2003, representing a value of 9 billion US dollars. About 75 percent of farmed shrimp is produced in Asia, particularly China and Thailand. Sound familiar, Nafta-teers?
On the world market, US shrimpers are small potatoes. US workers are an endangered species. Boats are for elites, for leisure, not for work.
Small local fishing companies are pitted against the large multinational. The unstoppable rise and dominance of shrimp aquaculture is flooding markets with a cheaper alternative. Mangrove forests are being destroyed world wide, and coastlines are being flooded with effluence from the chemicals and antibiotics used in shrimp farms.
The largest single market for shrimp is the United States, importing between 500 and 600,000 tons of shrimp products yearly in the years 2003-2009. Big elite boys do like their shrimp, or at least controlling the market. Heck, in Newport, Oregon, where I ran a fisherman's tavern, the corporations own the boats, and use their leverage to whittle down shrimp fishermen's shares to peanuts.
Follow the money? Halliburton does not care if a few Gulf shrimpers go out of business. But low cost shrimp pouring out of polluted ponds?...why that is almost like...don't say it...Rigged?...Oil spill?...Would BP deep six the wild shrimp industry just to make a profit?
Heck, if BP takes another month or two to fix the leak, the price of oil might go up enough to generate a tidy profit and shrimp cocktails for all.
