Amazon revolutionized online commerce and could play a similar innovative role in the grocery business after buying Whole Foods. But beyond undercutting competitors on price and convenience—its previous pathway to success—the Seattle-based powerhouse can help people become more ethical eaters during the current extinction crisis.
A great first step would be for it to stop selling Mexican shrimp and honor a boycott designed to save the world’s smallest and most endangered porpoise, the vaquita. There are fewer than 30 vaquitas left in Mexico’s Gulf of California. And small choices, like what kind of shrimp we buy, could help determine whether the vaquita disappears forever by 2019.
Best known for its goth-like eye markings and ability to avoid being captured in photographs, the vaquita contributes to the rich biological diversity that led the Gulf of California to be declared a World Heritage site. Yet these small porpoises are readily caught and drowned in gillnets, which have traditionally been used to catch shrimp.
Recently, Trader Joe’s revealed it would honor the boycott and stop selling Mexican shrimp. If Amazon quickly follows suit, these twin announcements would be key for vaquita conservation. Amazon and its influential employees and customers could send a powerful message that goes beyond the vaquita: It’s time to change our ways or lose half the species on Earth to human-triggered climate change and the sixth mass-extinction event in world history.
Amazon’s announcement would also help pressure the Mexican government to strengthen and enforce its loophole-ridden ban on vaquita-drowning gillnets. And Whole Foods’ competitors that are still selling shrimp from Mexico might rethink their decisions to ignore the boycott organized by more than 58 top scientific and conservation organizations.
Best of all this would be an easy, painless move for Amazon. The retailer only sells a couple different brands of shrimp from Mexico and already offers several domestic alternatives. And Whole Foods doesn’t appear to source its shrimp from Mexico.
Amazon has responded before to public pressure to stop selling unethical seafood. In 2007, after consumers complained that Amazon was selling cans of shark-fin soup, the company curtailed the practice. If customers and employees urged Amazon to again stand up for sustainable seafood, it could help save the vaquita and other species endangered by destructive fishing practices.
As the shark fin controversy began, an Amazon spokesperson passed the product off as merely “objectionable.” Yet killing sharks for their fins went beyond that because it was an illegal practice that was altering the ecological balance in our oceans.
Similarly, vaquitas have been slaughtered to the brink of extinction most recently by illegal gillnet fishing for the endangered totoaba, a fish whose swim bladders are highly prized in China — much like shark fins.
Boycotting Mexican shrimp — which are harvested using the same gillnets that illegally catch totoaba — will give vaquitas a fighting chance. Shrimpers in the Gulf of California killed about 70 percent of vaquitas from 1990 to 2010, and illegal totoaba fishing after that caused even more dramatic declines.
The Mexico government must keep all gillnets out of the Gulf. And it’s up to American consumers and retailers to provide the pressure to make that happen.
Just four days after its initial response on shark-fin soup back in 2007, Amazon stopped selling the soup and changed its tune: “Please be assured that we are removing the sale of these items from our website,” the company told upset consumers. “We always value customer feedback, and I have passed along your desire that we exclude items of this sort from our site.”
Now Amazon must again listen to its customers and do what’s right. Together we can save the vaquita and other endangered species from extinction.
Tanya Sanerib lives in Seattle and is an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.