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Shrimp Farmers Ravage, Ruin, Then R



Subject: Shrimp Farmers Ravage, Ruin, Then Run

The Japan Times  MAY 22. 1997 

Shrimp Farmers Ravage, Ruin, Then Run from Bangladesh Coastline

The Observer 
By SUZANNE GOLDENBERG

KEYAKHALl, BANGLADESH - They saw the enforcers coming from a distance -- 50
men cycling along the embankment, iron bars and homemade petrol bombs
glinting under a bright afternoon sky.

As the villagers cowered in their homes, the intruders hacked at the dam
laughing as the brackish waters bubbled over the pitiful strands of rice
paddy that had managed to sprout from the cracked earth.

"They were so ferocious. We didn't dare to confront them," says Qarimulislam
Biswas, strolling under a black parasol toward the spot where the waters
washed over the land. Though the villagers managed to drive back the saline
flood, Biswas doubts that anything will now grow on his seven acres, which
are smeared with white salt deposits. "I feel sick at heart," he says.

Victory belongs, once again, to the shrimp lord, a local businessman who
coveted these fields for aquaculture. The villagers, who had fretted for
three years while their lands lay under a salt swamp, reclaimed them last
year, hoping to revert to traditional jute and paddy crops. In villages such
as Keyakhali, in coastal southwestern Bangladesh, such struggles have become
commonplace. The villagers, no match for well-connected townsfolk who grab
land through stealth or outright coercion, generally lose out.

Within just over a decade, 350,000 acres of coastal lands in Khulna
district, as well as near the southeastern town of Cox's Bazaar, have been
turned into shrimp farms, devastating rich mangrove forests that had been
designated national treasures.

Much of Khulna now resembles a vast saline lake, where local hooligans on
speedboats and in bamboo watchtowers stand guard over the crustaceans.

For the well-connected, the area has become an aquatic Klondike --in
Bangladesh, as in the rest of Asia, putting shrimps on European restaurant
tables is big business. Asia now accounts for 80 percent of the $8.8 million
shrimp trade. A report by the charity Christian Aid estimates that the
European Union imported 135,528 tons of tropical shrimp in 1994, with 13
percent going to Britain.

The biggest fortunes have been made raising tiger shrimps, which are
exported to Japan, Europe and North America. But local peasants have not
shared in this wealth.

"You cannot suddenly stop the whole thing, but the people in Europe's big
restaurants should be conscious of what they are eating," says Khushi Kabir,
a Bangladeshi activist. "They should ask themselves what benefits the
laborers are getting."

It was in the name of local peasants that the World Bank and international
donor agencies first made massive investments in Asia's "blue revolution."
Intended to replicate the gains in agriculture made a generation ago,
aquaculture -- especially commercial farming of high-value luxury foods such
as tiger shrimp -- was supposed to give poor rice farmers in Bangladesh and
other Asian countries an alternative source of income.

In Bangladesh, seafood became the third-largest earner of foreign exchange.
But few people in Khulna have even tasted tiger shrimp -- which sell for 400
takas (about $9) a kilogram?as the land has been turned into saline desert,
unfit even for grazing cattle.

"It added to our national income but it added very little to the local
index," admits Atul Sarkar, the representative in Khulna of the Catholic
agency Caritas, which at first supported shrimp farms.

The sacrifices of local people were for gains that were never meant to last.
"It's a shifting cultivation. It destroys the environment, then it moves
somewhere else," said Atiur Rahman, an economist at the Bangladesh Institute
for Development Studies. "After five years, neither shrimp nor paddy can be
produced in that area. Then you have had it."

Bangladesh is already beginning to see diminishing returns, in part because
shrimp farming has been particularly unscientific and unplanned here. There
are no hatcheries for shrimp, instead women flush the shrimp fry out of
forest streams, depleting other species in the process.

The harvested shrimps are heaped casually on blocks of ice in wicker baskets
in tiny workshops in Khulna bazaar for grading. Earlier this month the
Europe an Union became so concerned at hygiene standards in local packing
plants that it threatened to halt food imports from Bangladesh.

Even those local farmers who were once enthusiastic about shrimp have grown
disillusioned. "I thought that we could make more money growing shrimp than
rice or jute," says Jahaboksha Biswas, a former headmaster. "But now we
understand fully that the salt water is absolute poison. It can produce only
shrimp and damages everything else around it." He points to a grove of
spindly palms at the edge of the former shrimp farm. "Even the coconut water
tastes of salt now."

That disillusion has found institutional expression. The World Bank and the
United Nations Development Program once enthusiastic supporters, are now
distancing themselves from aquaculture and the government is reviewing its
policy of granting easy credit to shrimp entrepreneurs.

Environmentalists describe shrimp farming in Asia as "rape and run"
industry. "I haven't seen anything so devastating," says Vandana Shiva, a
leading Indian environmental campaigner. "I have spent 20 years of my life
in environmental work and fought horrible disasters and there is nothing so
devastating of such rich ecosystems and of systems that lend themselves to
sustainable use.

"Always after a bust in one country there is a boom in another. There have
been waves in China, Indonesia, Thai land and the Philippines, now it has
come to South Asia." The next destinations are beckoning --Myanmar, Cambodia
and Vietnam.

Only in India, where the Supreme Court last December banned industry from
500 yards of the coastline, have local people and environmentalists been
successful in resisting the shrimp lords. However, businessmen have since
won a stay of that landmark judgment.

Otherwise shrimp farming had been unstoppable -- until nature took its
revenge with a disease that wiped out shrimp enterprises in Taiwan in 1987
and in India in 1994. The white spot virus, thought to result from bad farm
management, infects young shrimp. It devastated areas of Bangladesh last
year and is menacing this year's harvest, which is under way.

"You watch the shrimp coming to the surface and you feel very bad because
you know the business is over," says Sheikh Mohammed Moazzam Rashidi Doaza,
one of the bigger farmers in Khulna. The virus has already forced him to
consider pulling out of shrimp farming. "As soon as it stops being
profitable then I will leave."

The scourge has also put paid to hopes that local people could be swept up
into the blue revolution. "We were expecting that with the great
participation of local farmers in shrimp farming we could repair the losses
of recent years, but unfortunately then we had a natural disaster," Sarkar says.

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