We are not far from the ocean here. The air smells of salt and sulfur, of marine life. But the square of black, cracked mud in front of us, bounded by its four crumbling walls of sand, is no place for living things. It was previously a pond for cultivating tiger prawns, the lucrative species that was the reason for cutting the lush mangrove forest that once covered this area. The recent history of this abandoned place is sadly representative of the story of thousands of hectares in this region in the west of Sri Lanka.
A swelling appetite for shrimps and prawns in America, Europe, and Japan has fueled industrial farming of shellfish in the past few decades. The industry now has a farm-gate value of $10 billion (6.4 billion pounds) per year globally, and the prawn in your sandwich is much more likely to have come from a pond than from the sea. While the industry is dominated by the likes of China, Vietnam, and Thailand, a large number of other countries have invested heavily in cultivation too.
One is Sri Lanka, which saw the industry as a passport to strong economic growth and widespread employment. The country is just outside the world’s top ten producers. Sri Lanka’s farmed shrimp export accounts for approximately 50 percent of the total export earnings from its fisheries. More than 90 percent of the harvested cultured prawns are exported, going mostly to Japan.
Yet on a closer inspection, the picture is decidedly mixed. The country saw an explosion of unregulated aquaculture on the island in the 1980s and 1990s, bringing riches to a few and the hope of riches or at least an income to many more. But poor coastal management also brought white spot syndrome virus, a virulent disease that spreads in water and on the feet of birds, and can kill all the prawns in a pond in under a week.
