Push or Pull?

摘要

A shrimp egg is stocked in a tank at a Brazilian hatchery; a Pangasius egg is collected and taken to an incubator tank in Vietnam. Both go through larval stages, get stocked into ponds, fed and cared for daily by technical staff and workers in the farms and grow in four, five, six months to market size. The shrimp and fish are finally ready to be processed and sold to final customers. But who asked for that shrimp or that pangasius? Does someone want it? Each had a real cost to reach market size, inenergy, salaries, feeds... someone had to pay for that and usually it is the farmer. One would think that, yes, the farmer pays for this and then his or her investment is returned when the shrimp or pangasius is sold. However, we see that many farmers complain almost chronically that what they get for their product is less than what they pay to produce it.