Topic in Focus

What happens when purchasing practices create human rights risks in shrimp supply chains, and how can buying companies shift their behaviour to strengthen suppliers, workers and resilience?

Overview

This Deep Dive explores how purchasing practices create hidden human rights risks in shrimp supply chains. Participants examine worker experiences, supplier pressures and buyer constraints, and consider what behavioural shifts, enabling conditions and trust‑building steps could support more resilient, rights‑respecting value chains.

Why it matters

Shrimp supply chains show how commercial pressure from buying companies shapes conditions for suppliers and workers. ETI’s research finds that decisions on price, timing and order management can increase human rights risks and weaken resilience. These dynamics are especially visible in shrimp but occur across many sectors, making it vital to understand how purchasing practices contribute to risk and what conditions enable openness, trust and potential behavioural shifts.

Who should attend?

This session is relevant for policy makers, trade unions, INGOs and NGOs, unions, worker rights organisations, farmers, processors, importers, agents, retailers and companies across global sourcing. It is suitable for anyone interested in understanding how commercial dynamics influence human rights risks and resilience in global supply chains.

What participants will gain

• Insight from companies engaged in RPP on why they chose to address purchasing practices and what internal conditions enabled them to start.

• Perspectives from supply‑chain actors on current lived experiences, the bottlenecks these create, and what changes would meaningfully support them.

• Lived experience from worker representatives on the realities workers face and what improved purchasing practices can bring.

• Practical understanding of where to begin, how to open these conversations inside their own organisations, and what is needed to create an enabling environment for change across the chain.