According to a report published by FAO more strict management of shrimp fisheries is needed in order to mitigate overfishing, bycatch and seabed destruction, some of the major economic and environmental side-effects of shrimp fishing. The Global study of shrimp fisheries reviews current problems and solutions of shrimp fishing in ten selected countries namely, Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Kuwait, Madagascar, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Trinidad and Tobago and the United States.
Jeremy Turner, Chief of the FAO Fishing Technology Service, said that for millions of poor vulnerable households, shrimp fishing is an important source of cash and employment. Turner also informed that shrimp fishing is also associated with overfishing, capture of juveniles of ecologically important and economically valuable species, coastal habitat degradation, illegal trawling, the destruction of seagrass beds and conflicts between artisanal and industrial fisheries.
It is said that shrimp fishing. Shrimps and prawns are one of the most important internationally traded fishery products, with a value of $10 billion, or 16 percent of global fishery exports. But the economic importance of shrimp needs to be reconciled with the considerable concern about the environmental impacts of shrimp fishing, the report stresses.
As per FAO shrimp trawl fisheries are the single greatest source of discards. While reducing bycatch in small-scale shrimp fisheries is extremely difficult, future bycatch reduction should focus largely on medium and large-scale shrimp fisheries, where some remarkable reductions have already been achieved, applying modifications to fishing gear, catch quotas, discard bans and improvements in bycatch handling and marketing.
