Solon L. Barraclough and Andréa Finger-Stich

I. INTRODUCTION

During the last decade, shrimp aquaculture has become a major sector of fish farming in terms of space occupied and of market value. Nonetheless, it makes only a very small contribution towards meeting human needs for food. Shrimp exports bring substantial foreign exchange to poor countries and may contribute to regional and national short-term economic growth. Shrimp farming also generates improved incomes for some producers and labourers. The long-term negative environmental and social implications of commercial shrimp farming for livelihoods of vulnerable groups in tropical coastal regions where shrimp aquaculture is developing, however, tend to be neglected by those promoting this industry.

Fish provide nearly a quarter of the worldwide consumption of animal protein. Taking into account current population trends, while assuming constant consumption per capita and the falling productivity of ocean fisheries since the late 1980s, FAO estimates that by the year 2000 there will be a deficit of 19.6 million tons of fish and other seafood (Csavas, 1994b:50). Aquaculture primarily meeting local food requirements has received little support compared to commercial aquaculture, including shrimp farming (FAO, 1995).

Aquaculture development has been heavily promoted and subsidized by international and national lending agencies that often cite global food security needs as a justification (Huisman, 1990). This is fallacious for the major portion of shrimp aquaculture which caters to luxury demand. The shrimp industry has become a main beneficiary of these subsidies and institutional supports while it is putting at risk the livelihoods and food security of many coastal populations. The cultivation of shrimp requires large amounts of natural, financial and technical resources. Countries which have important parts of their population in need of food, such as India and Bangladesh, are presently becoming the main areas of expanding coastal shrimp aquaculture. Indeed, the industry is now being promoted in less developed areas with the support of the host governments and transnational companies that are often from higher income Asian countries such as Thailand or Taiwan Province of China. These same enterprises have frequently already exceeded production, environmental and political acceptance limits in their home countries.

Shrimp are almost exclusively produced for export to meet the demands of high purchasing power consumers in Japan, the United States and western Europe (Csavas, 1992:15). Consumption in these countries has almost trebled during the last decade, but with many fluctuations in demand, supply and price. Furthermore, shrimp consumption among high income groups in rapidly growing Asian countries is also increasing considerably. Shrimp aquaculture is, however, a rather inefficient way to produce food calories and proteins as it relies on pellet feeds derived from captured fish for from 25 to 50 per cent of its content (Primavera, 1994; Randall et al., 1990). Shrimp from intensive farms are fed about three times their harvested weight. But of the total amount of food provided, only about 17 per cent is converted into consumable flesh, 15 per cent is leached or not consumed, 20 per cent is released in faeces and the remaining 48 per cent is used by the organism for maintenance, moulted shells and metabolism[1] (Primavera, 1994:45).

World aquaculture is overwhelmingly concentrated in Asia. Asian aquaculture of all kinds produced about 17 million metric tons in 1992, while the rest of the world accounted for only a little over 2 million metric tons. Almost half of Asian aquacultural production is from fresh-water. In 1992, crustaceans accounted for only 4.7 per cent of total volume of Asian aquaculture, while the largest share (48.2 per cent) came from fin-fish mostly produced inland; seaweed accounted for 31.3 per cent and molluscs 15.7 per cent (Csavas, 1994b:48, figure 3). If coastal aquaculture is considered alone, crustaceans made up 8.2 per cent (Csavas, 1992:figure 9), of which most are shrimp with 750,000 tons produced in 1994 (Rosenberry, 1994b). Shrimp excepted, the greatest part of Asian aquaculture production remains in domestic markets. Since only the traded part of production enters the statistics, cultivated fish make up a greater share if self-provisioning could be estimated.

The trend towards intensive shrimp aquaculture is encouraged by high profits from farmed shrimp. These profits result in growing economic power of large producers and of shrimp feed and processing industries. The spread of shrimp production contributes to decreasing land availability for other activities such as peasant agriculture, grazing, artisanal fish production, forestry and tourism. It also stimulates sharply rising land prices in many coastal areas.

Intensive shrimp farms imply high stocking densities making them very prone to the propagation of pollution and disease. Hypernutrification and eutrophisation[2] of the ponds contribute to their foul smell and pollution as do added chemicals to get rid of predators, parasites and infections. This pollution affects local ecosystems and consequently the health and well-being of local people.

After a production cycle of about four or five months, shrimp ponds under intensive use are cleaned and disinfected and the polluted sludge is removed and often disposed of unsafely. This treatment, however, does not usually suffice to maintain the ponds' productivity for more than five to ten years (Boromthanarat, 1994, Annex III:12). Entrepreneurs then move to other areas because of pollution and disease. This mode of production has been called "rape and run" (Csavas, 1994b). The altered milieu of these abandoned ponds inhibits the spontaneous regeneration of vegetation and their use for agriculture, forestry, other aquaculture or related fishing activities. These abandoned areas do not appear in worldwide estimates of areas used for shrimp farming. Areas in shrimp ponds for 1993 were estimated to include 962,600 hectares, of which 847,000 hectares were in Asia. In December 1994 these areas in shrimp ponds were estimated to have increased worldwide to 1,147,300 with 1,017,000 hectares in Asia (Rosenberry, 1993 and 1994a). Globally, areas affected by the industry's practices over the last decade are probably at least one third larger, or even more if the total infrastructures surrounding the ponds are taken into account.

A few voices of local people most directly affected by the negative environmental and social impacts of shrimp farming have from time to time reached the media. The promoters of shrimp production usually heed them only in so far they jeopardize their immediate profits. Furthermore, environmental problems related to pollution tend to be addressed when they affect commercial aquaculture production. For example, aquaculture is highly dependent on water quality, so that this issue has received considerable attention by large shrimp producing enterprises. But, the impacts on aquatic biodiversity and natural resource loss and conversion affecting other land and water uses and users are frequently ignored both by the industry and public agencies. Aquaculturists and supporting national and international agencies are primarily concerned with mitigating those impacts that constrain further expansion of the shrimp industry.

Tropical coastal regions are among the most densely populated areas in the world. The durable productivity of these often fragile environments, as well as the continued access by inhabitants to their resources, are essential for maintaining inhabitants' livelihoods (Hinrichsen, 1994). In comparison to most other non-traditional export crops[3], shrimp aquaculture is developing at an exceptionally rapid pace. In the communities where commercial shrimp aquaculture has been implanted, nearly everyone is affected in one way or another. Environmental and social effects often extend far beyond the villages invaded by shrimp farms. Moreover, the new activities frequently not only deprive many local people of their traditional access to the land, water and other resources necessary for sustaining their livelihoods, before alternatives become available, but they may also severely degrade the surrounding environment.

Conflicts over the control of natural resources inevitably arise when market forces and public policies make new uses of these resources more commercially profitable than were traditional ones. Such conflicts are especially acute where customary uses by the groups exploiting them were primarily for self-provisioning and to supply local markets, while the new ones are to meet the demands of higher income consumers elsewhere. Even those groups who retain their traditional access to natural resources may find them less productive than previously. The levels and qualities of their livelihoods are likely to deteriorate in the long run.

Social and environmental problems associated with land alienation, technological change and the commercialization of natural resources and labour are well known. They have been widely documented and analysed since the enclosures of the English commons in the seventeenth century in order to increase supplies of cheap wool, mutton and labour to meet new demands stimulated by the incipient industrial revolution. The recent rapid expansion of shrimp aquaculture with its attendant contradictory social and environmental consequences should be viewed in this historical context. It is only one small recent incident within the broader processes generating social exclusion and environmental degradation. What has been happening socially and environmentally associated with the expansion of shrimp farming is in many ways similar to what happened earlier with the expansion in poor countries of other monocultures, such as banana, cotton, cocoa, tea, coffee and sugar for sale in world commodity markets. In 1993, shrimp futures were already being traded in the Minneapolis commodity exchange (Rosenberry, 1993:36), showing clearly the extent to which shrimp aquaculture has become commercialized.

New patterns of agro-industrial production and distribution are being increasingly stimulated by technological and organizational innovations. Their social and environmental impacts, however, are variable from one place and time to another. These impacts depend principally upon institutions and polices at all levels no matter whether these agro-industrial revolutions in production and marketing are "green" or "blue" (concerning aquaculture). Good research and informed debates are needed to help to generate political pressures for institutional and policy reforms that would enable the industry to be controlled in its expansion and become more sustainable socially and environmentally than it appears to be at present.

Care must be used in generalizing from fragmentary and unprecise national data as well as from a few case studies about the social and environmental implications of shrimp production. Published FAO production and trade statistics often do not separate cultivated from captured shrimp. The data concerning production trends are mostly generated for and by the industry itself. Bob Rosenberry, one of the industry's principal authorities on production and marketing trends, warns of margins of error of from 20 per cent to 40 per cent (Rosenberry, 1993:52). The reader should keep in mind that the estimates cited below are only rough approximations.

Each local situation is to some extent unique in both its social and ecological contexts. Even using similar technologies, intensive shrimp production in one situation may cause intrusion of salt-water into fresh-water aquifers, while in another place the fresh-water may be promptly replenished. Changing configurations of the coastline and ocean currents may result in wider damage when ponds are constructed or mangroves removed in some cases than in others. Pollution from shrimp ponds may contaminate drinking water in some places but in others it may not. Serious pollution from urban sewage and industry may soon force shrimp enterprises to move to new pristine areas in some places, but may not affect them as much as self-pollution from the ponds in others. Such limitations should be kept in mind when interpreting the tentative conclusions and suggestions that emerge from this partial review of the literature.

The social and environmental implications of shrimp cultivation seem to have been insufficiently or inadequately scrutinized by independent researchers. The available data concerning shrimp aquaculture reflect this paucity of critical studies. Production increases and export earnings are well publicized, but local socio-economic losses and environmental degradation affecting the well-being of coastal populations seldom appear in the balance sheets.

This paper looks at interrelated social and environmental impacts of shrimp aquaculture that have been largely neglected. We attempt a critical analysis based on available data and a few case studies appearing in the literature. The reader should keep in mind the many limitations of the present paper. It is based on information we were able to find from Geneva. Data were frequently partial, fragmentary, descriptive and probably not very comparable. We have merely attempted to place available materials in an analytical framework that links environmental with social issues, as well as to indicate gaps that call for further research.

After this introduction, we look at the recent rapid expansion of shrimp aquaculture with emphasis on Asia. A third section attempts to identify the principal actors of the shrimp industry from cultivation through processing, trading and consumption stages, including its financial and official supporters. A fourth section describes how the shrimp industry is displacing, suppressing or exploiting existing and potential alternative productive activities. We examine environmental impacts such as mangrove destruction, pollution and other forms of land and water degradation. The interrelated negative social and environmental impacts this kind of development entails are often referred to as "externalities". We scrutinize them critically to assess their importance for those most affected. We suggest that the shrimp industry's expansion often builds on existing inequalities and generates new ones. We raise questions about who seems to be benefiting and who seems to be losing and about which actors bear what kind of risks and detrimental impacts.

A fifth section looks more broadly at the roles that market forces, institutions, policies and official discourse play in the growth of the shrimp industry and its social and environmental impacts. The partial remedial actions private and public social actors are attempting in order to mitigate or remedy negative consequences of the industry are assessed critically. Finally, a short appendix proposes directions for further research on social and environmental issues related to the expansion of shrimp aquaculture. Such studies could contribute in particular to better use of tropical coastal resources for meeting present and future food, employment and income needs of local people, while taking into account the foreign exchange requirements of developing countries.

Footnotes

1. Based on a study conducted in 1992 on 4,500 hectares of intensive farms in the Philippines producing between 3 and 6 metric tons per hectare per crop, with two crops per year.

2. Hypernutrification results from an excess load of nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus and ammonia) in the water. Eutrophisation is the consequent increase in organic matter and decrease in dissolved oxygen. The latter often leads to phytoplankton blooms.

3. Flower production is an export cash crop that has a comparable growth rate.