Located to the East of Africa, Madagascar is the largest island in the Indian Ocean and its fauna and flora are highly endemic. Mangrove forests cover an area of 327,000 hectares, composed of seven tree species accompanied by an extremely diverse fauna.
Bulletin articles
The Nigerian area of saline mangrove swamps stretches through the coastal states with 504,800 hectares in the Niger Delta and 95,000 hectares in Cross River State. The mangrove forests of Nigeria rank as the largest in Africa and as the third largest in the world.
The plans to build the world's largest shrimp aquaculture facility in the Rufiji Delta of Tanzania have encountered strong opposition from local people (see WRM Bulletin 40).
On Nov. 7, 1990, Koronamoyee Sardar was killed by an armed gang of hired thugs whose aim was to set up a shrimp farm at Horinkhola Polder 22. The local villagers, led by Koronamoyee, resisted this invasive force. On that fateful day, Koronamoyee became a martyr for her cause, and in the eyes of her people she remains their heroine in their decade long ongoing struggle against the surrounding oppressor.
Shrimp farming has been practised in Indonesia for hundreds of years. Shrimps were traditionally cultivated in paddy fields or in ponds combined with fishes, without significantly altering the mangrove forest. Due to recent increase in market demand, the method has been changed into intensive and semi-intensive, with much less respect to local ecosystems and people.
The shrimp industry in Malaysia has developed rapidly since the early 1980s after the so-called successes experienced in neighbouring Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines. Malaysia, however, is not one of the major producers of cultured marine prawn in the world, as the area under marine prawn culture is about 5,100 hectares (2,627 hectares in 1995). Despite this, the Government of Malaysia is very proud to claim that the country's average production (metric tonnes per hectare) is the third highest in the world, after Taiwan and Thailand.
In the 1980s, shrimp farming became an industry when commercial availability of new technology from Taiwan, along with attractive export prices, led to the Shrimp Fever that swept the country and the rest of Asia. Filipino farmers shifted from milkfish (Chanos chanos) to shrimp, as well as intensified their culture systems from traditional and extensive to higher stocking densities.
Thailand has been the world's No. 1 producer and exporter of farmed shrimp for a number of years, with the shrimp boom starting in the early 1980's. The country's total shrimp output reached 300,000 tonnes last year, higher than the annual average of 200,000 to 250,000 tonnes, thanks to a supply shortage in the world market. Despite this, during 2001, shrimp farmer and exporter associations have asked the government to speedily implement a national policy encouraging shrimp farming to prepare for tougher export competition from neighbouring countries.
Governments in Southeast Asia have promoted shrimp farming as a means to earning foreign exchange. The beneficiaries of this expansion are private companies such as the Thai agribusiness company, Charoen Pokphand. In Thailand, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, Charoen Pokphand and the Thai government worked together to set the scene for expanding the shrimp industry. Companies setting up shrimp farming operations in Thailand were offered generous subsidies including tax breaks, tariff-free imports, tax holidays and export credits.
From 1982 onwards, the shrimp industry has been settling in the Cispatá bay, an ecosystem harbouring one of the most exuberant mangroves in the Colombian Caribbean. Presently there are four shrimp industries fully established in this site, covering an extension of approximately 700 hectares. The semi-intensive productive system these farms apply has a daily water recharge in its ponds, reaching an average of up to 15% of its volume, leading to a daily dumping into the estuary of large quantities of water saturated by organic waste.
Over 30 years ago, the destruction of mangroves was started in order to build ponds in beaches and bays. According to data from the former INEFAN and the National Aquaculture Chamber, in January 2000 there were 207,000 hectares or 170,000 hectares respectively of shrimp ponds, of which 50,454 hectares were operating legally. The rest are illegal. In the province of Esmeraldas, where the best conserved and tallest mangroves in the world are to be found, over 90% of the ponds installed there are illegal.
The waters of the Pacific Ocean penetrate the territory of Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador through a 35 km entry, forming a water mass of 3,200 kms2 known as the Gulf of Fonseca, with a 261 km coastline.
Different types of wetlands are to be found along the coast, such as mangroves, periodically irrigated by the tides. A forest inventory made in 1987, showed that in the Honduran sector of the Gulf, there were 47,000 hectares of mangroves that year.