Books on the topic 'Shrimp production'

By most accounts, forced labour, human trafficking, and modern slavery are thriving in the global economy. Recent media reports — including the discovery of widespread trafficking in Thailand's shrimp industry, forced labour in global tea and cocoa supply chains, and the devastating deaths of workers constructing stadiums for Qatar's World Cup— have brought once hidden exploitation into the mainstream spotlight. As public concern about forced labour has escalated, governments around the world have begun to enact legislation to combat it in global production. Yet, in spite of soaring media and policy attention, reliable research on the business of forced labour remains difficult to come by. Forced labour is notoriously challenging to investigate, given that it is illegal, and powerful corporations and governments are reluctant to grant academics access to their workers and supply chains. Given the risk associated with researching the business of forced labour, until very recently, few scholars even attempted to collect hard or systematic data. Instead, academics have often had little choice but to rely on poor quality second-hand data, frequently generated by activists and businesses with vested interests in portraying the problem in a certain light. As a result, the evidence base on contemporary forced labour is both dangerously thin and riddled with bias. Researching Forced Labour in the Global Economy gathers an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars to tackle this problem. It provides the first, comprehensive scholarly account of forced labour's role in the contemporary global economy and reflections on the methodologies used to generate this research.

This book explores the many rivers, lakes, and oceans that are losing oxygen. Aquatic habitats with little dissolved oxygen are called dead zones because nothing can live there except some microbes. The number and size of dead zones are increasing worldwide. The book shows that oxygen loss causes fish kills, devastates bottom-dwelling biota, reduces biological diversity, and rearranges aquatic food webs. In the 19th century in rich countries and in poor regions today, dead zones are accompanied by waterborne diseases that kill thousands of people. The open oceans are losing oxygen because of climate change, whereas dead zones in coastal waters and seas are caused by excessive nutrients, which promote excessive growth of algae and eventually oxygen depletion. Work by Gene Turner and Nancy Rabalais demonstrated that nutrients in the Gulf of Mexico come from fertilizers used in the US Midwest, home to the most productive cropland in the world. Agriculture is also the biggest source of nutrients fuelling dead zones in the Baltic Sea and other coastal waters. Today, fertilizers contaminate drinking water and kick-start harmful algal blooms in local lakes and reservoirs. Nutrient pollution in some regions has declined because of buffer zones, cover crops, and precision agriculture, but more needs to be done. The book concludes by arguing that each of us can do our part by changing our diet; eating less, especially eating less red meat, would improve our health and the health of the environment. A better diet could reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emitted by agriculture and shrink dead zones worldwide.

We fail to mandate economic sanity, writes Garrett Hardin, "because our brains are addled by...compassion." With such startling assertions, Hardin has cut a swathe through the field of ecology for decades, winning a reputation as a fearless and original thinker. A prominent biologist, ecological philosopher, and keen student of human population control, Hardin now offers the finest summation of his work to date, with an eloquent argument for accepting the limits of the earth's resources--and the hard choices we must make to live within them. In Living Within Limits, Hardin focuses on the neglected problem of overpopulation, making a forceful case for dramatically changing the way we live in and manage our world. Our world itself, he writes, is in the dilemma of the lifeboat: it can only hold a certain number of people before it sinks--not everyone can be saved. The old idea of progress and limitless growth misses the point that the earth (and each part of it) has a limited carrying capacity; sentimentality should not cloud our ability to take necessary steps to limit population. But Hardin refutes the notion that goodwill and voluntary restraints will be enough. Instead, nations where population is growing must suffer the consequences alone. Too often, he writes, we operate on the faulty principle of shared costs matched with private profits. In Hardin's famous essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons," he showed how a village common pasture suffers from overgrazing because each villager puts as many cattle on it as possible--since the costs of grazing are shared by everyone, but the profits go to the individual. The metaphor applies to global ecology, he argues, making a powerful case for closed borders and an end to immigration from poor nations to rich ones. "The production of human beings is the result of very localized human actions; corrective action must be local....Globalizing the 'population problem' would only ensure that it would never be solved." Hardin does not shrink from the startling implications of his argument, as he criticizes the shipment of food to overpopulated regions and asserts that coercion in population control is inevitable. But he also proposes a free flow of information across boundaries, to allow each state to help itself. "The time-honored practice of pollute and move on is no longer acceptable," Hardin tells us. We now fill the globe, and we have no where else to go. In this powerful book, one of our leading ecological philosophers points out the hard choices we must make--and the solutions we have been afraid to consider.