Environmentalists describe seafood farming in Asia as a rape-and-run industry, writes Suzanne Goldenberg in Keyakhali, Bangladesh
THEY saw the enforcers coming from a distance – 50 men cycling along the embankment, iron bars and home-made 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 towards 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 prawn lord, a local businessman who coveted these fields for aquaculture. The villagers, who had fretted for three years while their lands lay under a salty swamp, reclaimed them last year, hoping to revert to traditional jute and paddy crops. In villages such as Keyakhali, in coastal south-western 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, 350000 acres of coastal lands in Khulna district, as well as near the south-eastern town of Cox’s Bazaar, have been turned into prawn 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 prawns on European restaurant tables is big business. Asia now accounts for 80% of the $9-billion prawn trade.
The biggest fortunes have been made raising tiger prawns, 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 labourers 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”.
Aquaculture – especially commercial farming of high-value luxury foods such as tiger prawn – 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 prawn – which sell for 400 takas (about $10) 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 prawn cultivation.
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,” said Rahman.
Bangladesh is already beginning to see diminishing returns, in part because prawn farming has been particularly unscientific and unplanned. There are no hatcheries for shrimp; instead women flush the shrimp fry out of forest streams, depleting other species in the process.
The harvested prawns are heaped casually on blocks of ice in wicker baskets in tiny workshops in the Khulna bazaar for grading. Last month the European Union became so concerned about hygiene standards in local packing plants that it threatened to halt food imports from Bangladesh.
Even those local farmers who were once enthusiastic about prawn 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.”
Such disillusion has found institutional expression. The World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme, once enthusiastic supporters, are now distancing themselves from aquaculture and the government is reviewing its policy of granting easy credit to prawn entrepreneurs.
Environmentalists describe prawn farming in Asia as a “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.”
Prawn farming had been unstoppable – until nature took its revenge with a disease that wiped out prawn enterprises in Taiwan in 1987 and in India in 1994.
The white-spot virus, thought to result from bad farm management, infects young prawn. 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. “As soon as it stops being profitable then I will leave.”