ng doled out to the aquaculture and tourism sectors by drawing a balance sheet of the costs and benefits, including the social cost involved? Take the shrimp farms, for instance. The life cycle of a shrimp farm is a maximum of two to five years. The ponds are then abandoned leaving behind toxic waste, destroyed ecosystems and displaced communities, annihilating livelihoods. The farms come up at the cost of natural eco-systems including mangroves. The whole cycle is then repeated in another pristine coastal area. It has been estimated that economic losses due to the shrimp farms are approximately five times the potential earnings.
Tourism is no better. Kerala in south India, marketed as “God's own country”, destroyed the mangroves in a desperate bid to lure the tourists. It is only after tsunami struck that the state government was quick to announce an Rs 340-million project aimed at insulating the Kerala coastline against tidal surges. Other tourist destinations in Asia will now probably go for a rethinking. The question therefore that needs to be asked is whether we need to extract a heavy human toll before we realize the follies of blindly aping the stupid market economy mantra? How many more people we want to die and how many millions we want to go homeless before we realize the grave mistake of pushing in the market economy? Who will hold these free market economists responsible for the human loss and suffering? #
(Devinder Sharma is a New Delhi-based food and agriculture policy analyst. Responses can be mailed to: firstname.lastname@example.org )
The first lesson is about development in coastal regions. Respect for the fragility and vulnerability of coastal ecosystems has been sacrificed for hotels and holiday resorts, shrimp farms and refineries. Mangroves and coral reefs have been relentlessly destroyed, taking away the protective barriers. Our study of the Orissa cyclone in India in 1999, which killed 30,000 people, found that the destruction was much more severe where the mangroves had been cut down for shrimp farms and an oil refinery.
The people's movement against industrial shrimp farming led to a court order to shut down the farms within 500 metres of the coastline. But the shrimp industry tried to undo environmental protection laws by seeking exemption from the government. We calculate that every acre of shrimp farming has an ecological footprint of 100 acres in terms of destruction of mangroves and the surrounding land, along with sea pollution. Every dollar generated by shrimp exports leaves behind $10 of ecological and economic destruction.
Conversely, the indigenous tribes of Andaman and Nicobar - the Onges, Jarawas, Sentinelese and Shompen - who engage in traditional fishing methods, had the lowest casualties, even though they were closest on the Indian sub-continent to the epicentre of the earthquake.
The government of Kerala state, observing that the tsunami left less destruction in regions protected by mangroves than barren and exposed beaches, has started a project for insulating coasts with mangroves.
Second, the tsunami shows us how severe the costs of continuing business as usual can be. The tsunami should wake up people like [Bjorn] Lomberg [an environmentalist who has questioned global warming]. They should ask the people of the Maldives whether they accept the inevitability of irreversible sea-level rise due to climate change induced by the burning of fossil fuels. I felt nature was telling us: "This is what sea-level rise will look like, this is how entire societies will be robbed of their ecological space to live in peace on the planet."
The third lesson is that environmental vulnerability must be reduced, not increased, and the true costs of damaging development taken into account.
10 January 2005, Mannam Memorial National Club, Trivandrum
Over one hundred people, consisting of fishermen and women, government officials, NGO activists and scientists, participated in the one-day Consultation on “Tsunami Disaster: Implications and Lessons for the Future”, organized by the South Indian Federat