Shrimp Farming and the Environment - Library

One of the key elements for success in cooperative semi-intensive or intensive shrimp farming seems tobe access to credit. However, the danger with making credit available to people who have littleexperience in managing credit is that they can easily fall into the trap of spending available moneyduring grace periods and thus failing to meet payment deadlines. Also, the risk, particularly of a firstcrop loss, can place the poor and small-scale shrimp farmer in a precarious debt situation from whichhe/she may find it difficult if not impossible to recover. Risk issues are discussed further in Chapter 5.In addition to access to credit, training and extension expertise are important factors for the poor smallscalefarmers. Extension work can be set up in the community, with experts looking after a moderatelylarge number of small-scale operations and helping the farmers adjust their operations to variousconditions.Mitigation of lack of credit accessThe lack of credit availability to the poorer sectors of society in developing countries is a majorconstraint to their becoming shrimp farmers (Holland 1998). However, easy credit may encourage bothunsustainable practices and indebtedness, so credit should not be extended lightly. There are examplesfrom Thailand of easy credit availability to promote small-scale shrimp aquaculture in the early ’90sthat resulted in extremely rapid intensification, and in some cases environmental degradation, disease,financial collapse, and indebtedness.As with other incentives, credit should not be used in isolation but rather as one element in a suite ofincentives and constraints designed to ensure the sustainability of the sector in a particular area orregion. Conditionalities related to credit (in terms of farm operation or intensity) will be hard toenforce, and it will generally be more appropriate to strictly limit the amount available, and relate it tothe scale of enterprise and skill of the farmer. Such practices should help ensure that intensification isnot overly rapid, and that skills can develop steadily as the use of inputs and production levels increase.Very small amounts of credit, coupled with effective extension-based support and infrastructure, canlead to highly significant increases in income for shrimp growers as well as their employees.Displacement of local populationsDisplacement of local populations as a result of some of the impacts described above has beenreported, but there are few well-documented and thoroughly researched examples. In many cases, it isunclear whether shrimp farming was the major factor, a contributory factor, or merely incidental tocommunities’ displacement. However, these are serious issues and deserve further research.Human rights violationsThere have been reports of human rights violations in connection with the development of shrimpfarms. Such cases are usually associated with large corporations that invest in a local area and resort tophysical force to intimidate protesters. In the course of this study, no conclusive evidence of humanrights violations was found. Secondary information is commonly reported and presented as “evidence,”without any attempt to obtain a firsthand, objective description of the situation. Once again, theseissues are serious and warrant objective study.Social disturbancesDisruption to local livelihoods and communities has sometimes been sufficient to provoke socialdisquiet, and in some cases serious social disturbances, e.g., in Bangladesh, India (Murthy 1997), andother countries. The 1994 NACA survey reported wide variations in Asia, with rather few (