SINFUL SHRIMP

"Today's neo-Puritan activists fear that someone, somewhere, may be enjoying.a plate of shrimp. And, like the puritans of yesteryear, they see grave danger in allowing people this simple pleasure. They claim that much of the $7 billion worth of shrimp produced globally each year hurts the environment, so they want people in America and other developed countries to eat less shrimp to curb the damage.

Persuading people to feel bad about enjoying shrimp won't be easy. For one thing, there is no shortage of this popular food, so claims of shrimp being endangered are a tough sell. In a typical year, Americans consume more than 1 billion pounds of shrimp, according to the American Seafood Distributors Association. About 90 percent of that comes from overseas, often from commercial shrimp farms in developing countries.

Now a coalition of environmental activists wants Americans who like to dine at chain restaurants, such as Long John Silver's, to eat less shrimp from the Third World. This coalition includes veterans of past protest campaigns, such as Greenpeace, Public Citizen, and the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), but even these stalwarts have had trouble getting traction on this issue, though not for lack of trying.

Last year, EJF claimed that Western demand for farmed shrimp was leading to "a range of human rights abuses" in the Third World, including "sexual abuse, rape, child labor, forced labor and murder." Consumers failed to respond to this call to action -- even hard-core green activists must have found this over the top -- so now EJF is trying a different tack. In May, EJF issued a report claiming that shrimp farming causes "a plethora of environmental degradation"."


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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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