By most commercial measures, Indian shrimp has had a very good year. In August India was the largest shrimp supplier to the United States for the second month running, shipping 33,376 tonnes worth USD 281.8 million. Seafood exports from April to August rose 14.3 percent to USD 3.65 billion, as last year’s punishing US tariffs were rolled back. Farm-gate prices in India have just reached a 12-month high. And the free trade agreement agreed with the European Union in January will remove the 26 percent EU tariff on Indian seafood. The deal is expected to be signed in December and to take effect in 2027.
That is the good news. The less comfortable news is that India’s biggest risk in shrimp is no longer tariffs, prices or Ecuador. It is a small number of ponds where farmers still use antibiotics that have been banned for years. From now on market access will be won or lost at the pond, not at the port.
Small numbers, big consequences
The numbers look small at first. In 2025–26 the government told Parliament that seven Indian shrimp consignments were rejected in the EU and twelve in the US, all of them for banned antibiotics. Against frozen shrimp exports of 792,647 tonnes worth USD 5.62 billion in the same financial year, that is a rounding error.
It would be a mistake to read it that way. According to MPEDA, chloramphenicol and nitrofuran residues accounted for 43 percent of shrimp rejections by the EU, the US and Japan in 2025. Both substances have been banned in food animals for a long time, precisely because no safe residue level can be set for them. In June the drug regulator CDSCO wrote to the states after these residues were traced to more than 40 farms, 74 percent of them in Andhra Pradesh, followed by Odisha, West Bengal and Gujarat. A rejection is not a quality complaint about one container. It tells the importing authority that something in the national control system did not work.
The EU now asks the country, not just the company
This matters more now because the European rules changed in September. Under the EU’s new antimicrobial requirements, from 3 September 2026 only countries on a special list may export farmed animal products to the EU. Every consignment must carry an attestation, signed by the national competent authority, that the animals were not treated with antimicrobials reserved for humans or used as growth promoters. India was added to that list in June, covering aquaculture products among others.
In practice, the Indian state now gives a guarantee for every shipment of farmed shrimp that goes to Europe. A guarantee is only as good as the weakest farm behind it. If residues keep turning up, the EU’s response will not stop at one exporter. India has seen this before. In 2010 the EU required that at least 20 percent of Indian aquaculture consignments be tested at the border for substances such as chloramphenicol and nitrofurans. When controls improved the share was cut to 10 percent. Then in 2016 it was raised to at least 50 percent, after a Commission inspection found that India’s guarantees rested mainly on pre-harvest and pre-export testing and that official farm controls on veterinary medicines were very weak. That rule has not gone away. The Commission’s own 2022 audit of India’s residue controls describes it as still in force: half of all Indian aquaculture consignments tested at EU borders, and every consignment accompanied by a laboratory result from India. The auditors noted that without that pre-export testing, EU border failures would have been much higher. In other words, the system catches problems at the end of the chain because it does not yet prevent them at the start. That kind of testing costs time, money and buyer confidence, and it hits honest exporters as hard as the careless ones.
The opportunity on the other side is large. The EU has approved 625 Indian fishery establishments and the tariff cut makes Indian shrimp more competitive in Europe than it has been for years. A zero tariff will not help a container held for testing at Rotterdam.
Why the problem sits on the farm
Most Indian shrimp is not grown by big companies. It comes from many thousands of small and medium farms. In the Bhimavaram cluster in Andhra Pradesh alone there are more than 42,000 ponds on about 53,861 hectares. Shrimp passes from pond to aggregator to processor, often within days, and a processing plant may buy from hundreds of farmers in a season. When a farmer under pressure from disease reaches for a cheap product from the local agro-shop, the exporter often only finds out when a laboratory in Europe or the US does.
The government has acted at its level. The Health Ministry banned the import, manufacture and sale of these drugs for animal use in March 2025, and CDSCO has asked the states to inspect veterinary shops and report what action they have taken. That is necessary. But a ban on sales does not reach the drum already stored in a farm shed, or the product sold under another name. Enforcement at the shop has to be matched by control at the farm gate.
What exporters can do now
For processors and exporters, the most effective tools are not new. Supplier approval should mean more than a farmer’s name and a bank account number. It should include a visit, records of what was used in the pond and a signed declaration that means something. Pre-harvest testing for banned substances, done by an accredited laboratory before the shrimp leaves the pond, costs far less than a rejected container. Lot traceability has to link every carton back to a farm and a harvest date, so that a positive result can be traced to its source, and so that one farm’s mistake does not condemn a whole season’s production. All of this belongs inside the HACCP plan, with raw material from farms treated as a real hazard rather than a trusted input. Farm certification under BAP, ASC or GLOBALG.A.P. helps when it is used as a management system and not just as a certificate on the wall, and group certification can bring smaller farms into the same discipline. None of this is glamorous, but it is what EU and US auditors and buyers will look for, now more than ever.
Keeping what has been won
Indian shrimp has done the hard part. It has built the volume, the processing capacity and the buyer relationships to lead the US market and to make the most of a new deal with Europe. The remaining weakness is not commercial but technical, and it is entirely within the industry’s reach to fix. The question for the coming year is not whether India can sell more shrimp. It is whether every one of those ponds can stand behind the guarantee that now travels with each shipment.