Shrimp production in important state of West Bengal.
On the outer fringes of the Sundarbans biosphere in West Bengal, Monirul Mondal is busy assessing the mangrove trees in front of him at various stages of growth. The mangroves of Haroa village serve a different purpose—here, the trees are actively nurtured and are used to cultivate organic shrimp in the massive farms spread in a handful of villages across the North 24 Parganas district. It was a different scenario however a few decades ago, where the region witnessed large-scale clearing of mangrove forest land to accommodate the lucrative business of shrimp farming or aquaculture, which resulted in environmental degradation.
In India, West Bengal is an important state when it comes to shrimp production, carried out in the hundreds of farms located across North and South 24 Parganas and the Purba Medinipur districts, an area that spans some 50,000 hectares. According to the West Bengal state government data, in the country, the state ranks second in shrimp production after Andhra Pradesh. Globally, India is one of the top five shrimp-producing countries.
For over half a century, the Sundarbans biosphere has been a key region in the country for shrimp farming. But widespread shrimp aquaculture, particularly after the 1980s, to meet demands of markets in the west, has had a severe ecological impact on the Sundarbans biosphere, where unsustainable, unchecked farming practices directly resulted in mass-scale deforestation of the mangroves. “While the deforestation of mangroves had been happening for years, we saw even more deforestation for shrimp farming in the region,” says Dr. Bimal Kinkar Chand, joint director of research, West Bengal University of Animal & Fishery Science.
While shrimp aquaculture has been a highly profitable business, it has come under immense criticism globally for the disastrous impact that it has on the environment and water systems, particularly on mangrove loss, in several countries like Ecuador, India, Brazil, Panama, Thailand, Costa Rica and Indonesia.
[source:indianexpress.com]
