Shrimp and Sea Turtle

CASE NUMBER: 8
CASE MNEMONIC: SHRIMP
CASE NAME: Shrimp and Turtle Case

1. Issue

The Earth Island Institute (EII), a San Francisco-based environmental organization, filed a suit on February 24, 1992 to protect turtles. The suit would force the U.S. Departments of State and Commerce to comply with the Federal law requiring the ban of shrimp imports from countries who endanger sea turtles in the process. The law was applied to countries with shrimp operations in the Caribbean and the western central Atlantic. The Earth Island Institute believed the law should also be extended to include Pacific and Indian Ocean nations such as Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, and South Korea, as well as Mexico and Brazil. Countries currently operating under the law only account for ten percent of the world's annual shrimp harvest. This earlier protest involved Mexico, but a newer one comes from India and the Philippines.

2. Measure: Import Standard

Section 609 of U.S. Public Law 101-102 requires adequate measures to conserve sea turtles with respect to commercial shrimp operations. This was met through the adoption of turtle-excluder devices or TEDs. The law was intended to extend the protection given to sea turtles under U.S. regulations to other areas these turtles inhabit throughout the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, and western central Atlantic (the wider Caribbean). The countries affected by the law are Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, French Guiana, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela. Mexico was the leading exporter targeted by the measure.

The EII argued that "the defendants failed to certify...that all shrimp harvesting nations have regulatory programs and incidental taking rates of endangered sea turtles comparable to those in the US."1 In specific, Earth Island claims that India, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, South Korea and Brazil, who are the largest shrimp exporters to the United States, are among the dozens of countries "whose fishing fleets...kill more than 150,000 turtles a year."2 Earth Island also argues that the State Department is required by law to negotiate treaties with those countries and encourage the use of TEDs for conservation. The effectiveness of the law is undermined when only Caribbean and Atlantic countries must abide by the regulation. Mexico, in response to Earth Island Institute versus Baker case, and fearing an embargo similar to that of Mexican tuna exports to the United States, announced in May of 1992 that it too would require protection of sea turtles.3

3. Exporter and Importer: MEXICO and USA

4. Trade Impacts

In 1989, U.S. shrimp exports from Mexico were $281.3 million. When regulations on shrimp were imposed that year, exports fell to $176.5 million before rebounding in 1991. By 1994, Mexican imports had risen to nearly to the 1989 total, at $256.5 million (see Figure 9).

Although Mexico was the largest importer, relative impacts on other countries were much greater than on Mexico. Venezuela's exports fell over 50 percent between 1989 and 1990, from $47.1 million to $22.6 million and Brazil's fell by about the same amount from its 1989 value of $44.6 million. Costa Rica's imports dropped from $11.3 million to $3.7 million, or by about two-thirds. Panama's imports dropped from $69 million to $41.8 million.

The top shrimp exporters to the U.S. are India, Indonesia, Thailand, Mexico, Malaysia, Korea and Japan. The measure "could effect shrimp imports from more than 80 nations totaling as much as $1.8 billion -- more than 75 percent [by value] of all shrimp consumed in this country."4 In 1988, 331 million pounds of shrimp worth $506 million were imported to the United States. (The rest of the 802 million pounds eaten in the United States came from elsewhere). More than 30,000 commercial fishermen and their families rely on shrimp, and many times that number work in shore side processing plants.5

5. Other Economic Impacts

An official with the Texas Shrimp Association, Wilma Anderson, said the new regulations would cost the association's 700 members "additional gear expense and additional production loss." She said compliance with existing rules requiring turtle excluder devices for part of the year has cost shrimpers between $30,000 and $35,000 per boat per year.

6. Environmental Impacts

TEDs are panels of large mesh webbing or metal grids inserted into the funnel shaped shrimp nets. As the nets are dragged along the bottom, shrimp and other small animals pass through the TED and into the "cod end" of the net, the narrow bag at the end of the funnel where the catch is collected. Sea turtles, sharks, and fish too large to get through the panel are deflected out an escape hatch. Fishermen, who believe that the device causes their nets to dump 20 percent or more of the shrimp as well, call them "trawler eliminator devices." One source notes a 6 percent loss of shrimp harvest due to the requirement to use TEDs.6

It estimated that U.S. shrimp trawls drowned 11,179 sea turtles annually, a figure recently updated by the National Academy of Sciences to 55,000.7 Conservatively, as many as 11,000 sea turtles may have been killed annually in offshore shrimp trawls. According to NMFS estimates, approximately 48,000 sea turtles are caught each year on shrimp trawlers in the Southeast United States and approximately 11,000 die. Of those, 10,000 are loggerheads and 750 are Kemp's ridleys. The extrapolation comes from 27,500 observer hours during which 800 turtles were caught; approximately 25 percent were dead when they hit the deck.8 Turtle excluder devices (TED's) have been developed for shrimp and fish trawls to reduce these incidental deaths. TED's enable turtles to escape the trawl net and prevent them from drowning. TEDs reduce the turtle kill by shrimp trawls by 97 percent.

Sea turtles are threatened worldwide and the Turtle Excluder Device is a relatively small investment, compared to other fishing costs, to prevent the unnecessary deaths of sea turtles. Perhaps this case leads to the bigger question of the great waste of resources during fishing for particular species and the problem of incidental deaths. Incidental death rates for certain fishing species, including quite valuable ones, are often very high. Perhaps the real environmental gains in fishing regulations can be achieved through requirements that promote greater efficiency in using greater specific species content of wild fish that are caught and segregating others for survival.

Although it is too early to tell about the effects on the turtles' population, they must age 25-30 years before they can reproduce, nesting activity on two beaches increased considerably during the two years the regulations have been required.9

7. References

1. "Environmental Group Sues Government Over a Failure to Ban Certain Shrimp Imports," International Trade Reporter (BNA, March 4, 1992).

2. Katherine Bishop, "Lawsuit Seeks Ban on Shrimp Imports," The New York Times (February 25, 1992), A13.

3. David Clark Scott, "Stung By US Tuna Ban, Mexico Protects Turtles,"

4. The Christian Science Monitor (May 14, 1992), 7. The Christian Science Monitor, May 14, 1992.

5. Smithsonian, 47.

6. Christian Science Monitor, October, 1989.

7. Audubon, September, 1995.

8. "Shrimpers and lawmakers collide over a move to save the sea turtles," Smithsonian 20/9, December, 1989, 44.

9. The Christian Science Monitor, May 14, 1992.