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Chapter 6 Trading Quality, Producing Value: Crabmeat, HACCP , and Global Seafood Trade Kelly Feltault As I entered the company’s lobby, I was drawn to a brochure that announced “The Story of Crab: the Maryland Crab Cake.” The brochure featured an image of a succulent, golden crab cake made from the cultural food icon of the Chesapeake Bay region—Callinectes sapidus, or the blue crab. However, I was not in Maryland or even in America. I was in Bangkok at Pakfoods Incorporated, a Thai-owned multinational seafood corporation, waiting to meet with company executives. The crab cake on their brochure was made from a different species of swimming crab, Portunus pelagicus, harvested from the Gulf of Thailand. Pakfoods ships these to large chain restaurants in the United States, where crab cakes are one of the most popular menu items, part of a trend in growing seafood consumption. Between 1980 and 2005 America’s per capita seafood consumption increased 14 percent over the previous seven decades, but over 70 percent of this seafood was imported.1 Crabmeat was not initially an imported product. U.S. harvest levels of blue crabs rose 57 percent between 1970 and 1990 when Chesapeake crabmeat companies experienced a boom period through high-volume sales to expanding restaurant and grocery chains.2 However, in 1992 one of their largest customers , the restaurant chain Phillips Seafood, began importing crabmeat from its new plants in Southeast Asia. In Thailand companies such as Pakfoods converted their shrimp factories to crabmeat facilities, which became the latest high-value seafood export supporting the country’s economic development strategy. Between 1995 and 1999 the amount of imported crabmeat increased 550 percent, and Chesapeake companies began losing customers .3 Then in 1995 the crab stock in the Chesapeake showed signs of collapse. This story may appear as a tragedy of the commons: consumers’ desire for a healthier, low-fat diet led to overfishing in the United States, resulting in increased seafood imports from developing countries. However, my research suggests that restaurants’ increased competition for crabs was the initial reason for offshore production. Back in the boardroom of Pakfoods, executives told me that they were better able to control the natural resource through quality control because “the process became standardized here in Thailand, the fishery— the crab—was standardized, to regulate quality.”4 This statement suggests that global seafood networks trade quality distinctions that shape supply and demand , as well as environmental change. The tragedy-of-the-commons argument does not connect environmental change and resource capture to the restructuring of the food service industry in the 1980s, nor does it explain how or why seafood companies create global seafood commodity networks. The search for new seafood products combined with mergers and expansions of regional seafood restaurants restructured purchasing toward high volumes from single suppliers. This reshaped the quality demands on seafood suppliers and required an element of control over the network starting with the natural resource. The seafood industry gained control over natural resources through a new global seafood safety inspection system, the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP). This science-based auditing system facilitated the creation and maintenance of global seafood networks and created environmental and social change. In this chapter I unravel how and why transnational crabmeat networks were constructed and sustained based on quality distinctions, and how these networks operate within neoliberal globalization and development policies. I argue that HACCP formalized a scientific definition of quality, remaking the seafood industry in the image of pathogens and hazards—risks to be controlled— through the production of knowledge and value systems that facilitated the control of the natural resource and reshaped its value. However, despite the status of HACCP as a global regulatory standard intended to harmonize trade, it is not homogenous and instead operates as a heterogeneous global governance system producing uneven outcomes through differentiated products, production sites, environments, and workers. Globalizing Networks and Nature Since the 1980s development agencies such as the World Bank have encouraged developing countries to specialize their food production toward highvalue foods (HVF) as a way to increase export earnings and foreign direct investment.5 Seafood has been a cornerstone of this export-oriented industrialization , and developing countries account for half of all exported seafood products in the world.6 As a result, fish have been the most heavily traded international food commodity for the last twenty-five years, and capture (wildTrading Quality, Producing Value 63 [3.144.248.24] Project MUSE (2024...

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