Shrimp production: Understanding the scope of the problem

Decapods represent a major food source for humans across the globe. If these animals are sentient, the growing decapod production industry likely poses serious welfare concerns for these animals. Information about the number of decapods used for food is needed to better assess the scale of this problem and the expected value of helping these animals. In this work, we estimated the number of shrimp and prawns farmed and killed in a year, given that they seem to be the vast majority of decapods used in the food system. We estimated that around: - 440 billion farmed shrimp are killed per year, which vastly exceeds the figure of the most numerous vertebrate species used in the food system–namely, fishes and chickens. - 230 billion shrimp are alive in farms at any moment, which surpasses any farmed animal estimate known to date, including farmed insect numbers. - 25 trillion wild shrimp are directly slaughtered annually, a figure that represents the vast majority of all animals directly killed by humans for food. At this moment, the problem of shrimp production is greater in scale–i.e., number of individuals affected–than the problem of insect farming, fish captures, or the farming of any vertebrate for human consumption. Thus, while the case for shrimp sentience is weaker than that for other vertebrates and decapods, the expected value of helping shrimp and prawns might be higher than the expected value of helping other animals.