Monday, 08 September 2025
Monday, 08 September 2025
Sujoy Maity’s day begins at the crack of dawn, his head occupied by the bheris, the brackish estuarine waters in eastern Midnapore where he and his employees farm shrimps. These days, apart from the shrimps, he worries about Donald Trump.
Thousands of miles away from Maity’s bheris, right in the heart of Times Square in New York City, is Utsav, a restaurant serving Bengali cuisine since 2002. In their menu card, given pride of place at $30 (roughly Rs 2,600), is the classic Bengali daab-chingri, a delicacy celebrating the perfect marriage of coconut and prawns. But Trump’s imposition of a 50 per cent tariff on Indian shrimp exports is not good news for either Utsav or Maity.
The best substitute is much cheaper. These are the Bangladeshi shrimps, which have a 20 per cent tariff on them. There are other options too, cheaper — now, after the tariff spike — than what Maity can send across.
Maity and several other shrimp farmers in eastern Midnapore, who send shrimps to seafood exporting houses based in Kolkata, are worried.
“If the tariff on Indian shrimps is at 50 per cent, what will happen to exports,” asks Maity, his tone indicative of the magnitude of the issue.
In the shrimp farming business since 1998, Maity has his math at his fingertips. For every 20 g of shrimp, he spends anything between Rs 320 and Rs 330/kg. “This includes the cost of electricity, diesel engines for running aerator machines for shrimps to grow comfortably and optimally. If one can sell those 20 g at Rs 350-Rs 360/kg, there is a little profit. But the tariff makes things impossible with other local farmers lowering their rates.”
Maity, a resident of Kolaghat, around 73km west of Kolkata, inherited his father’s business.
“That was in 1998, when there were only a handful of people [doing the business]. August and September used to be the main months then for the bagda [tiger] prawns. Things got better in 2001 after some new prawn feed arrived from Andhra Pradesh. The months of farming also extended to the whole year apart from December and January.”
By 2002-2003, Indian shrimp exports to the US had surged ahead of Japan. The price per unit received in the US was higher, and so was the quantity exported. According to the Marine Products Export Development Authority, Indian shrimp exports were at $4.88 billion in the 2023-24 financial year. That year, India exported 297,571 metric tonnes of frozen shrimp to the US. In this shrimp rush, Maity’s business also grew in giant leaps.
A big-money game such as this is not without its pitfalls. Shrimp aquaculture practices for export must adhere to strict standards and one must be careful to avoid charges of dumping. In August this year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned Walmart that ‘great value shrimps’ sold by them after importing the goods from a company in Indonesia might have a radioactive substance — Celcius-137 — whose continuous consumption might lead to cancer.
At a Trump cabinet meeting in August, US health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr grabbed his opportunity. “South Asian nations are now dumping shrimp in our country and its heavily contaminated,” he said. Kennedy Jr went on to claim that shrimp farming practices involving “bactericides, antibiotics, and chemicals” have led to contamination, causing European nations to reject these shrimps, which are then dumped in the US.
Though Kennedy Jr attempts to taint shrimp exporters — not to mention the error of placing Indonesia in South Asia — the farmers in West Bengal swear by their clean, non-contaminated, antibiotic-free products. The export standards are ingrained in the system, they claim.
“Cleanliness is most important. We don’t use any medicines, antibiotics,” Maity says. “There must be proper laboratory testing of the sample for it to be fit for export.”
Bengal shrimps’ journey across the world
If the shrimps' journey to New York City starts in Midnapore, the next stage is the process of freezing, packing and shipping the containers across the seas to America. Indranath Pyne, in his mid 40s, is a fourth-generation businessman who does this.
The business Pyne inherited began in 1906 at Calcutta’s Crooked Lane with Thomas Elque. In 1943, Balaichand Sen bought the company and handed over the reins to his son Anil, Pyne’s maternal grandfather.
From manufacturing hats for the British police and later for then viceroy Charles Hardinge to exporting mango chutneys to shrimps, it has been a long journey. “The seafood exports began only in 1972 with Anil Sen when Calcutta Seafood was born,” Pyne says.
Pyne, who takes over from Maity for the second leg of the export journey, is in a state of panic because of the tariffs.
“The whole idea of a tariff carries with it the sense of extending protection to the local producers. The tariff on Indian shrimps, which are not available in the US, does not tally with this logic. This tariff is more politically driven than anything else, and doesn't protect the local farmers,” he says.
He explains that since West Bengal shares the same fishing region with Bangladesh, farmers in Bangladesh will be at an advantage now with 30 per cent less tariff. If the idea is to extend protection for the US economy, Bangladesh shrimp exports should have the same tariff, he stresses.
“I am comparing West Bengal and Bangladesh, like apples to apples," Pyne says. “We both export the same species. These are all warm-water shrimps and very different from the shrimps in South America — I am not bringing in other parts of India like Andhra Pradesh or Gujarat or Maharashtra or Kerala who are also big exporters of shrimps.”
The ships from West Bengal carry the freshwater shrimps (scampi), the black tiger prawns and the Vanamei shrimp, a Vietnamese variety that India has also been farming for the last 10 years. This is exactly what Bangladesh exports. West Bengal earns upwards of Rs 4,000 crore in shrimp exports. Andhra Pradesh leads the production, followed by West Bengal and Gujarat.
“The ships sail from Kolkata to Colombo and then they are trans-shipped to New York or to Los Angeles. These are the routes. It takes about 60 days to reach the US via the Cape of Good Hope. So far, all the containers have unloaded at the respective ports [without issues or concerns about the quality],” Pyne says.
‘We certainly don’t use any substandard measures’
Even as the Trump cabinet listens to Kennedy Jr, this is not the first time Indian shrimp exports to the US have faced challenges that have affected business.
In March 2024, Chicago’s Corporate Accountability Lab came out with a detailed report on the alleged human rights and environmental abuses in India’s shrimp industry, primarily in Andhra Pradesh.
“The conditions found in the Indian shrimp sector are not inevitable but instead result from cost-cutting and downward pricing pressure by US supermarkets, restaurants, and wholesalers that ‘squeeze’ producers to provide ever-cheaper shrimp,” the report said.
The Seafood Exporters Association of India denied it.
“We certainly don’t follow any substandard measures, and the Indian shrimp industry follows the highest food safety and ethical standards,” Pyne says on the allegations.
For now, at Utsav — owned by the daughter of the owners of Park Street's BarBQ — and elsewhere in New York City, seafood-loving Americans can still heap their plates with shrimps from India at a fair price. The daab-chingri is still being served and eaten. The real worry is in Midnapore.
Eastern Midnapore, major participants in the salt satyagraha of the 1930s when people from the area broke the prevalent laws by manufacturing contraband salt, has transformed its coastal geography into fields of shrimp gold, with big and not-so-big farmers knee-deep in the business.
Maity and the other farmers are experts in their area of work but for their market to remain unaffected, they need to get the man who says “trade wars are good and easy to win” off their backs.
