, and Clay hopes shrimp-farming countries can agree on standards within a couple of years.
Photo: U.S. EPA.
There are already a few examples of kinder and gentler shrimp farming. One farm in Colombia has replanted large stands of mangroves, and is using them as a natural filter for farm waste. Thanks in part to pressure from Environmental Defense, the state of Texas requires its shrimp farms to clean their discharged water and keep a tight lid on disease outbreaks.
But all this isn’t of much immediate help to the cactus forests of western Mexico — or to coastal dwellers like Julio Garcia Ussher. When Garcia Ussher retired from a career in the Mexican seafood industry, he moved to his family’s cattle ranch on the southern Sonoran coast. He thought he’d spend a few years being the ranch’s caretaker, just to enjoy the quiet and the proximity of the sea.
Over the past two years, more than 250 acres of private land around Garcia Ussher’s ranch have been razed. Cacti and mesquite lie stacked on the bare ground, forming long rows that some locals call chorizos, or sausages. Garcia Ussher misses his desert vistas, but he’s not surprised at their disappearance. He spent a year working for Ocean Garden, a state-owned company that is Mexico’s largest processor and exporter of farmed shrimp, and he knows how this business works.
“When the people who own these projects see places like this,” says Ussher, “they say, ‘What’s here? Nada. Who’s going to protest? Nadie.”
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