 tantalized the people of the southern Sonoran coast. In the early 1970s, the Mexican government created hundreds of ejidos, or land collectives, within a few miles of the Sea of Cortez. Thousands of people arrived from mountain mining towns, all drawn by the promise of a stable farming life. But most of the land set aside for the ejidos has little or no water, making small-scale farming a very tough go.
“People are tired of not having work,” says Lupita Mendivil, who lives in Ejido Las Agilas with her family. “They’re saying, ‘Vamonos, let’s go for aquaculture.'”
Some ejidos have sold their collectively owned land to shrimp-farm big shots. Others, such as Ejido Las Agilas, hope to enter into joint shrimp-farming ventures with Mexican or foreign investors. A few ejidos have turned a profit this way: One joint venture earned more than half a million dollars in 1999.
But the business is risky. About a quarter of Mexico’s shrimp farms have been shut down by disease outbreaks or other problems in recent years, and earnings have been erratic. A recent report to a group of international organizations, including the World Bank and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, says some Mexican farms are little more than money-laundering operations for drug dealers.
Lalo Mendivil, Lupita’s brother, has spent most of his life fishing near the tiny coastal village of Navopatia. He understands the high hopes of the people in Las Agilas, but he worries that the shrimp-farming boom will threaten his livelihood.
The estuary where Mendivil fishes is already polluted by agricultural runoff, and he says the shrimp operations will only make the situation worse. There are few state or federal environmental controls on shrimp farms, and shrimp-farm waste is often dumped directly into the ocean.
“We need work, but this shrimp business is worse than nothing,” he says. A 1,000-acre farm might employ four people, he says, but in the long term it might kill off enough fish to put 100 fishers out of work.
Mendivil isn’t alone in his outrage; in several places along the coast, angry platoons of fishers have filled shrimp-farm waste canals with shovelfuls of sand and gravel.
Ibrael Lopez Espinoza, who grew up in Ejido Las Agilas but works as a lab technician in a nearby city, is torn by the shrimp-farming business. He’d love to be able to make a living in his hometown, but he worries about the impact of a shrimp farm on the nearby estuary.”In many cases, the bosses haven’t respected the rules,” he says. “I’m an environmentalist, and, God willing, I can make sure we learn from these bad examples.”
Espinoza is not the only environmentalist who believes the shrimp-farming industry can be reformed. In the late 1990s, shrimp farming attracted publicity as a classic example of free trade run amok. Several countries — among them India, Honduras, and Ecuador — tried to rein in the shrimp-farming expansion, and financial troubles convinced the industry to accept a few restrictions. The publicity has quieted down, but grassroots activists in shrimp-farming countries have continued to criticize the industry, and a few North American and international groups have kept up the pressure.
Some activists say shrimp farming is ready for big, industry-wide improvements. Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund wasn’t too interested in shrimp until 1996, when he started comparing the impacts of shrimp farming and open-ocean shrimp trawling. After deciding that farming was a lot more “fixable” than trawling, he spent three years traveling the world, investigating the best and the worst of shrimp farming.
“Shrimp is still worth more than any other agricultural commodity,” he says. “The industry isn’t going away, but we can make it something we can live with.” To that end, Clay is helping to develop an international certification system for farmed shrimp, one that will include hard-and-fast rules about habitat protection, pollution control, and fair treatment of workers.
Members of a United Nations subcommittee on aquaculture support the idea of a certification plan