Environmental Factors And Impacts Of Large-Scale Shrimp Farming Industry

History of Shrimp Farming

Question:

Discuss about the Production Diversity and Dietary in Smallholder.

Shrimp production industry is among the top agricultural earners in the world, becoming among the most popular aquaculture. Shrimp is majorly produced on the large scale as farmers fear to lose their customers in case their supply doesn’t meet the demands of the consumers, both locally and internationally. Shrimp farming deals with aquaculture businesses that are carried out in freshwater environments in an attempt to produce prawns and shrimp (Beattie, Melillo, and O’Gorman, 2014, p. 100). Among the top producers in the world are United States, Japan and Western Europe and in Asia, particularly China and Thailand. Marine shrimp farming is a very important industry which has positively impacted to the developing countries through a realization of increased GDP and development of infrastructure as well as enabling industrialization. This essay will specifically examine the various environmental factors that determine the large-scale farming of marine shrimp and determine how its products affect the environment.

Shrimp farming developed for many centuries in Southern Asia and currently all its operations are carried out in a traditional manner. Shrimp farming originated from South East Asia as early as at the beginning of the 15th century. In the 1930s, industrial shrimp farming began and was conducted by the Japanese agrarians in kuruma shrimp. With all the varieties first discovered and practiced in small-scale, ponds were used specifically to enhance monoculture and some other times polyculture in case the shrimps were to be reared alongside other species (Verones, F, 2015, p. 10). They could substitute them with rice whenever the land seemed to dry. This type of agriculture was only carried out along the coast or on river banks. Shrimp yield in the ponds and river banks has been increasing from period to period due to the application of modern farming techniques some of which include the intensification of culture operations via regularization of formulated feed, pond size, stocking density, and aeration application in the farming process. The diagram below shows shrimp farming happening in the river shows and how it was conducted in the past century.

Traditionally, the ponds used in shrimp farming were irregular in shape and sized between 3-20 hectares. The extensive culture operation employed has been considered the simplest approach to seeds tock  and shrimp farming to high productivity.

Shrimp just like other marine life is captured from the water. Despite various fluctuations of shrimps, marine shrimp farming nations have majored on the export of their products. For example, Brazil realized an increase in production from 15000tons in 1950 to 80000tons in 2004 (Zhang et al., 2015, p. 22). The categories of shrimp grades and components vary according to various factors including environment, geographical locations, climate and cultivation processes as well as the age of shrimps. Various amendments and procedures are being put in practice in order to increase the rate of extraction and lower its cost and timespan. The extraction of shimp may be summed:

Production, Consumption, and Export of Shrimp

Shrimp farming increases its growth in production in order to cope with the demand in the market. Its market is increasingly enlarging all over the world with the western countries being on the frontline experience this commodity. It has actually grown higher within a span of the last 54 years according to research, increasing from 15000tons in 1950 to 80000tons in 2004. The demand is almost surpassing the supply, though the marine shrimp farming countries are ensuring that they produce higher yields as compared to their previous seasons. Generally, all the producer countries do it for export, but they end up exporting less than 50% of the total production as demand from the locals’ increases steadily (ITC, 2015, p. 45).

The production of shrimps, in this case, is directly linked to its consumption simply because it is noticed that the consumption rate increases as the production increases too, hence increasing the overall fame of the industry. Asian countries such as China are the leading consumers and producers as well, of shrimps in the world, which is directly proportional to their production respectively. The US does the production for specifically importation purposes (Seixas, 2015). This may be shown as below:

Large-scale shrimp production is affected by environmental factors, either positively or negatively, which automatically reflects the total yield. One of the major factors is climate. It is defined as the current weather conditions of the place, comprising of the precipitation, pressure, humidity, and temperature. Climate is prone to changes. Whenever it becomes too hot, the evaporation rate in the water bodies is likely to increase causing heavy rainfalls. This leads to rising of sea level and endangering the marine life (Amaral et al., 2014, p. 20).

Shrimp production has negatively been affected by disease problems repeatedly. In 1993, china was greatly affected by a shrimp viral disease that reduced the totals percentage of production by a large margin. Governments import regulations have also been a big blow to the shrimp farmers and producers as well (Chaves et al. 2013, p. 200). They normally don’t allow shrimps contaminated by chemicals to be imported. This automatically lowers the investment levels especially in those places where land price and wages are low. Initially, poor people could get jobs in the coastal regions where shrimps were being reared but due to increased market prices of the same, they have lost those jobs and the foreign currency being earned by the government remains negligible. Whenever heavy rains are experienced, high rate of erosion occurs and is mostly followed by drains and formation of salts which is a major threat to associated marine schemes (Marroquin-Cardona et al., 2014, p. 56).

Environmental Factors that Affect Shrimp Production

Fertilizers applied to these land plantations also affect the soil negatively as they lower the pH as well as directing the chemicals to the nearby riverbanks whenever it rains. This causes harm to the lives of the shrimps and also being a threat to those farmers who depend on the river water for irrigation (Andretta, 2015, p. 66). Another environmental disturbance for shrimp farming is that most of the production industries in developing countries are normally not keen in their disposal and waste management (Rajapaksha et al. 2014). They sometimes direct their wastes to water bodies, endangering the marine life. These emissions contain harmful gases such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and sulfur gases.

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