Statement on Flawed Journalism in Associated Press Article on the Indian Seafood Industry.

Pawan Kumar, President, Seafood Exporters Association of India

This report contains a number of errors and omissions, and leaves readers with a willfully
distorted view of Indian shrimp exporters that could cause harm to the very workers AP claims to be concerned with, setting back economic development in the region by years.

We are the leading trade association in India representing shrimp exporters, and yet AP reporters not only never reached out to us for comment or input prior to publication. Even worse, when we learned of their reporting after they confronted several of our members and their customers at a conference in the U.S., we reached out to AP ourselves and they flatly ignored us. They also never responded to our reasonable request that we have an opportunity to respond to any allegations they intended to print about us. They ignored similar outreach from the National Fisheries Institute, America’s largest seafood trade association, and included only a single brief quote from NFI from before that group had a chance to look into any specifics.

At that same conference AP reporters spread malicious rumors about several of our members that were later demonstrated to be false, as AP was forced to admit. Yet those falsehoods, which were irresponsibly presented as fact, led some customers to interrupt their relationships with some members—a fact that AP outrageously brags about.

Nekkanti for example had to chase down Ms. Mendoza after it learned she had spent many days falsely disparaging the company to its customers. The AP article claims our members at Wellcome did not respond to her, but that is untrue, and in fact Ms. Mendoza never reached out to that company at all. If she had, Wellcome would have provided the same details of its strong labor and environmental record that it provided to the customers to whom AP presented the unsubstantiated allegations.

As far as we can tell, AP never presented our association or any of our members with specific details about the infractions they alleged, making it impossible for us to examine them or indeed to establish whether they ever happened. But we did inform AP that none of the members they asked about had ever been found to have committed any of these kinds of infractions, and made them aware of multiple, independent channels our employees have to safely report any issues.

AP left all of that out of the story. They also misleadingly conflate the shrimp exporters we represent with smaller companies that operate only within India’s domestic market, leaving readers with the impression that major exporters are involved in the bad behavior they describe without presenting any evidence that that is the case.

We will have more to say about this deeply flawed article at our web site, and we encourage anyone who cares about the truth of these matters to read our substantive and substantiated response before making up their minds.