Your numbers suggest humans eat over 3000 shrimp per year, or about 10 shrimp per human per day. (27 trillion shrimp / 8 billion humans = 3,375 shrimp/human).
My sense is that where I live (USA) people might eat a shrimp dish with 10 shrimp maybe once a week, not daily.
Who is eating all these shrimp? Is it all going into shrimp paste in Asia? Do you know how many individual shrimp go into a representative shrimp-paste-based meal?
(Very interesting article! Useful facts.)
[edit: Initially I used 35T instead of 27T. That was the wrong number. Thanks to Angelina for pointing that out.]
I’m also confused about this. I found a paper[1] that estimates the annual amount of shrimp paste produced in China at 40,000 tons, and says that China is the largest shrimp paste producer in the world. The spreadsheet states that ~251,093 tons of A. japonicus were caught in the wild in 2020, so depending on what proportion of shrimp paste is produced in China[2] and how many tons of shrimp are needed to make one ton of shrimp paste, this could be accurate?
I did a cursory search for information about shrimp paste production in other countries and couldn’t find any numbers, but I didn’t look very hard and it’s possible you could find more accurate information.
I think there’s pretty broad agreement that it is indeed the case that most wild-caught shrimp are being turned into shrimp paste. The recent SWP post has some discussion.
For what it’s worth, the 40,000 ton number is also present in some other sources, but it’s hard for me to trace it back further than that due to language barriers. Since making shrimp paste involves drying the shrimp, it seems to me that the largest country manufacturing 40000 tons of paste could be consistent with 251000 tons of A. japonicus being caught.
Where did you get the 35 trillion number from? Did you mean something closer to 27T (the median estimate for the “Total number of shrimp (farmed and wild-caught, 2020)”)?
Your numbers suggest humans eat over 3000 shrimp per year, or about 10 shrimp per human per day. (27 trillion shrimp / 8 billion humans = 3,375 shrimp/human).
My sense is that where I live (USA) people might eat a shrimp dish with 10 shrimp maybe once a week, not daily.
Who is eating all these shrimp? Is it all going into shrimp paste in Asia? Do you know how many individual shrimp go into a representative shrimp-paste-based meal?
(Very interesting article! Useful facts.)
[edit: Initially I used 35T instead of 27T. That was the wrong number. Thanks to Angelina for pointing that out.]
I’m also confused about this. I found a paper[1] that estimates the annual amount of shrimp paste produced in China at 40,000 tons, and says that China is the largest shrimp paste producer in the world. The spreadsheet states that ~251,093 tons of A. japonicus were caught in the wild in 2020, so depending on what proportion of shrimp paste is produced in China[2] and how many tons of shrimp are needed to make one ton of shrimp paste, this could be accurate?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0023643822010313 .
I have low confidence in this estimate because I looked at the paper it’s citing and don’t see that number anywhere in there.
I did a cursory search for information about shrimp paste production in other countries and couldn’t find any numbers, but I didn’t look very hard and it’s possible you could find more accurate information.
I think there’s pretty broad agreement that it is indeed the case that most wild-caught shrimp are being turned into shrimp paste. The recent SWP post has some discussion.
For what it’s worth, the 40,000 ton number is also present in some other sources, but it’s hard for me to trace it back further than that due to language barriers. Since making shrimp paste involves drying the shrimp, it seems to me that the largest country manufacturing 40000 tons of paste could be consistent with 251000 tons of A. japonicus being caught.
Where did you get the 35 trillion number from? Did you mean something closer to 27T (the median estimate for the “Total number of shrimp (farmed and wild-caught, 2020)”)?
Good point. I’m not sure now where I got 35T. I just now edited the original post.