8 April 2008

PRESS RELEASE

Environmental Group Protests Shrimp Farming in Nigeria

The Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD), a rural-based, non-profit making organization working in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria decries the plan by Sulalanka Nigeria Limited to commence industrial shrimp farming in Southern Nigeria.

The consortium (Sulalanka) in partnership with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources, and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, organized a workshop tagged "Shrimps Aquaculture Programme in Nigeria: Farming of Marine Black Tiger Shrimp", and concluded that shrimp farming remains a veritable way of diversifying prevailing mono product economy in the country.

Representatives of the would-be host communities of the shrimp culture facilities were conspicuously excluded from the purported "Stakeholders" workshop; the rural people are the primary stakeholders. Like her counterparts operating in Asia and Latin America, Sulakanka Nigeria Limited has by this pioneering act, showcased the inevitable disregard and disrespect it has in store for the rural communities. It is indeed an early warning signal.

CEHRD, therefore, challenges the duo of the federal Ministry of Agriculture and the FAO to provide the Nigerian public with global case studies - if any exist - to support their claim that shrimp farming is sustainable and translates to economic gains for the local communities. On the contrary, however, available records and CEHRD's field visits to shrimp farms in Asia reveal that industrial shrimp culture degrades coastal environment, erodes age-old livelihood structures of rural inhabitants and deepen poverty by the replacement of diverse life-support wetlands like mangrove with monoculture shrimp production.

Moreover, farmed shrimps are exported to the developed world and do not in any way enhance the food security of the local people.

Shrimps are generally susceptible to poor water quality and prone to diseases epidemics. Commercial shrimp culture, therefore, relies on routine application of antibiotics and other toxicants to forestall parasites and diseases infestation. Pond water is renewed regularly, resulting in the discharge of contaminated wastewater to surrounding river basin. This causes pollution of the receiving water and bioaccumulation of persistent toxicants in wild food organisms. Worse still, large expanses of mangrove, oftentimes, are cleared for shrimp pond construction.

For instance, 269,000ha of mangrove in Indonesia have been converted to shrimp ponds. Shrimp ponds are not sustainable and often are abandoned without re-vegetation schemes to restore the hitherto mangrove community. Nigeria cannot afford to loose the shrinking remnants of her mangrove area to unsustainable shrimp culture. The mangrove of the Niger Delta is the largest in Africa and the fourth largest in the world, and has been adjudged a key zone for the conservation of the western coast of Africa due to its extraordinary biodiversity. Studies have shown that 60% of the fishes in the Gulf of Guinea breed in the mangrove of the Niger Delta. Already the mangrove of the Niger Delta is threatened and shrinking by the synergistic effects of oil spill toxicity, over-logging, spread of nypa palm, and clearance for the passage of oil pipes and seismic lines, swamp reclamation for urban development, etc.

If commercial shrimp farming cannot be regulated in countries like Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, Ecuador, India, Peru, etc, where shrimp culture has  been practiced for decades, CEHRD wonders what would be the Nigerian experience especially given the blatant disrespect for regulatory laws and policies in the land by corporations with impunity. A case in point is gas flaring whereby several termination dates had been fixed by the federal government but repeatedly, were ignored by the multinational oil companies.

Secondly, industrial shrimping vessels operating along the Nigerian coastal shelf line continue to trawl within the 5-nautical miles non-trawling zone unchecked, and the problem of huge by-catch and discards associated with industrial shrimp fisheries which affect artisanal inland fisheries is yet to be addressed.

In CEHRD's opinion, the acquisition of requisite stock assessment data (which are lacking) that will aid in the ecosystem-based management of wild shrimp fisheries remains the most viable and sustainable option for Nigerian shrimp production and export to the North.

CEHRD, therefore, is calling on the Civil Society especially African Mangrove Network (AMN), coastal communities and the Nigerian people to reject in totality the Sulalanka shrimp farming proposal.

Submitted by:  Nenibarini Zabbey
Head, Conservation and Environment Programme
CEHRD (0803- 7504608)
E-mail; zabbey1@yahoo.com
nigerdeltaproject@yahoo.com

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