Prawn Farming

by Nalini Kasynathan

Farming in Tamil Nadu provides the landless agricultural labourers employment during the cropping season. It is said that one hectare employs 60 women and 15 men during one cropping season which lasts for 4 months. But the owners of the prawn farms claim that these lands are low yielding and infertile and are converting them into prawn farms .

I met Chandra in a village close to SirKali where many sea food companies have bought land and are setting up farms in lands that were previously used to grow grains. Chandra and her husband worked as agricultural labourers in those lands and with difficulty managed to feed their 6 children. Chandra and her famliy are moving to the near by town to live in a shanty town because they have not only lost their livelihoods but also the water in the wells in their village had turned salty . The wells and other fresh water sources in the village turned saline two years after the prawn culture companies came into the village.

India now earns a huge amount of money( 16 crore of rupees) because of these exports, and prawns are cultivated 100% for export. Chandra explained that a similar situation was happening to many villages around her and very soon small villages will cease to exist because people will have to move out if they do not have drinking water and have to depend on tankers for drinking water. When she heard that I as working for an Non-Government Organisation (NGO), she asked me if we could do anything to help this situation and improve the plight of many hundreds of families. I could only tell her that she was not alone in her plight. Many families in Sri Lanka living in the western coast of the country are also evicted from their lands because of these companies; many paddy lands are converted into ponds, and the farmers tell us that these lands will never become paddy lands again if prawn cultivation continues for a few years.

The key issue here is that prawns are grown for export. They are cultivated for the rich in both the North and the South at the expense of the poor - whose lands and livelihoods are taken away and so they are made to go hungry day in and day out. The greed of the rich results in the hunger deaths of the poor. While the rich die of high cholesterol because of over eating (particularly food items such as prawns which are high in cholesterol) the poor die of malnutrition and starvation.

Should this situation continue? Should the level of consumerism of the rich be allowed to grow unchecked?

Every time we eat a prawn we should be aware that the vast majority of prawns are cultivated in the South at the expense of the poor.