is 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, 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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