On the Mexican coast, little shrimp are causing big trouble
Just above the high-tide mark on the coast of northern Mexico, elegant fingers of pitaya cacti rise far above the surrounding mesquite trees. Roseate spoonbills and frigatebirds sail silently overhead, a dolphin skirts the tangle of mangroves near the shore, and a fishing boat sputters out to the Sea of Cortez. On this muggy, almost unbearably hot slice of Sonoran coastline, sunset can be the most dramatic thing that happens all day.
Or that, at any rate, was how life was before the bulldozers arrived. Speculators have demolished more than 1,000 acres of cactus forest on the edge of this enormous, mazelike estuary, replacing the prickly old growth with clusters of brackish ponds. The ponds are designed to produce yearly crops of plump shrimp, raised on fishmeal and destined for all-you-can-eat buffets in the United States.
Some of the people who live in the region are delighted by these changes. “We’ve never had a stable way to make a living,” says Poli Gastlum, a dignified oyster fisher and a longtime resident of a collective farming village called Ejido Las Agilas. “We’ve seen the numbers for shrimp farming, we know how much money it can make. This is going to work.”
Maybe. Since the World Bank underwrote the first Southeast Asian shrimp operations a generation ago, almost every country with a frost-free coastline has been hit by the fever for pink gold. But the industry has turned out to be a questionable investment and an almost unrelieved environmental nightmare: Shrimp farms have destroyed millions of acres of coastal cactus and mangrove forests, and they’ve turned many of the world’s pristine estuaries into shrimp toilets. In Mexico, where small communities often welcome shrimp farms into the neighborhood, the number of shrimp producers nearly doubled between 1993 and 1998. Shrimp ponds now cover more than 50,000 acres of the country’s west coast, and the development shows no signs of slowing.
A Jumbo Shrimp Problem
Get-rich-quick dreams have long 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 h