Mangroves and shrimp: a litmus test for food system transformation

With Brazil hosting COP30 in the heart of the Amazon rainforest in 2025, nature, food and deforestation will be high on the agenda for policymakers, investors and companies. Mangroves, along with terrestrial forests, must be central to their thinking.

Mangroves connect land and sea. They are vital biodiversity hotspots, home to hundreds of threatened species and supporting the livelihoods of millions of people around the world by providing food and extreme whether protection. They are also a vast carbon sink that can store up to five times more carbon per acre than rainforests.

Yet, since 1996, unsustainable practices in the food system have contributed to the destruction of over one million hectares of mangroves. And, despite their immense potential, mangrove protection and restoration receives only around 1% of climate finance today.

The good news? Transformation is proving possible and profitable with leadership emerging, restoration increasing and a clearer path forward for other commodities and regions across the food system.

Shrimp farming has, in many countries around the world, disconnected itself from mangrove destruction.

New data collected from geospatial monitoring technology shows there is now almost zero conversion of mangroves in two of the major shrimp exporters in the global market: Thailand and Ecuador.

In Thailand, the Seafood Task Force has been bringing the shrimp supply chain and broader stakeholder universe together for the past 10 years to unblock systemically significant challenges that seemed initially intractable. And through collaboration, from vessel to plate, across feed suppliers, farmers, processors, retailers and government, new solutions have been adopted. Extensive electronic traceability, for example, has been developed to strengthen accountability.

Action has also been driven on the ground so that farmers are empowered to make changes.

“We try to understand why people do things the way they do and not to tell them,” a leading Thai shrimp processor said. “The farmer must want to make the changes themselves. That’s the only way of making sustainable change.”

Furthermore, the system has aligned behind a new commercial rationale premised on the often-hidden value of confidence. As exemplified in the Seafood Task Force’s moto, “confidence to trade”, the aim is to give industry buyers of seafood confidence that the supply chain is ready to face the rising tide of policy and stakeholder expectations.

Meanwhile, in Ecuador, which is home to the largest mangrove forests in the Western hemisphere, the shrimp industry is valued at $7.4 billion.

The Chamber of Aquaculture, and the 400 companies it represents from the entire shrimp value chain, committed to ending habitat conversion from shrimp farming with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Ecuador, making Ecuador the first country to commit to conversion free aquaculture.

Together with WWF and the Sustainable Shrimp Partnership, the Chamber of Aquaculture tackled the data challenge by working with Clark University to map mangrove forests in Ecuador. Starting 10 km from the continental coastline, the initiative tracks destruction and restoration.

With data increasingly available, industry has pushed government to extend farming prohibition to mangrove forests, so the only way to expand or build a farm is to grow in areas not near mangrove forests.

Today, new solutions are also making the transition increasingly economic for farmers. The Climate Smart Shrimp fund, for example, has been successfully piloted by Conservation International and xpertSea to provide loan packages that enable farmers to adopt sustainable and efficient production systems while restoring mangrove ecosystems. Moreover, Ecuador’s Sustainable Shrimp Partnership and its member companies were the first to pioneer and adopt Blockchain technology to enable extensive traceability.

Thailand and Ecuador prove that systemic transformation is possible, and that it can be profitable when transformation is done in partnership with – not to – the stakeholder universe. As such, we’re seeing positive trends in the data with mangrove restoration efforts and mangrove growth increasing coverage.

Action continues apace in Thailand and Ecuador; and critically, they show the way for other commodities and regions. After decades working across the industry and environmental sustainability, five learnings stand out:

The food system is uniquely complex – but as Thailand and Ecuador show, it is transformable. Now, it’s over to other commodities, supply chains and regions around the world to rise to the challenge.