What is Globalization?

So, we talked a little a bit about where I was for breakfast. I thought we’d continue looking a little more at food, because there are stories to tell. You may be familiar with this animal in front of me. It is a tiger prawn. We know them for sushi, or maybe prawn cocktails. Most tiger prawns we eat today come from aquaculture, which means they are farmed. The way this works is, usually in coastal areas, we clear land and dig ponds. Each pond will usually be about the size of a football pitch. Those are used to grow the prawns. Now, we need to catch prawn larvae at sea- -and stock the ponds with that.

So, it’s not that we can grow prawns from scratch. We usually get these prawns from intensively farmed prawns. That simply means that the number of prawns in these ponds- -is far higher than what you would find in the wild. That means we need a few measures to make these ponds livable for the prawns. You need to aerate the water, so you have fans that will increase the oxygen in the water. You also need to take care and control different kinds of diseases- -because its not a natural situation to have so many animal close together. The third measure is… These are carnivores. They need to eat. It will take about three kilos of fish to produce one kilo of prawns.

That means you have to go out and fish fish to feed the prawn. Now, the largest producer of tiger prawns has been Thailand since the 1990’s.

Most of our tiger prawns are coming from Thailand and Southeast Asia. But Thailand is producing so many prawns that their fish catch isn’t large enough to feed them. So they will actually bring in fish from…

…the west coast of South America, Peru and Chile… …from Europe, from the North Sea… …from Japan and Korea… …as well as smaller amounts from various countries. Up to about 15 countries to supply the prawns.

Once the prawns are ready, they export most of their prawns back out to three main areas: Japan, The EU and North America. So this tiger prawn is more international than I am. Now, globalization is not a bad thing. It actually provides us with a lot of security and options. Should we have a failed yield or harvest one year, it doesn’t mean we’re destined for famine. We can import. Or, if we don’t have the resources we need, we can also import them. It’s a phenomenal opportunity and contribution to human well-being. The problem lies when we’re not aware of what we’re doing, and what lies behind what we are using.