Ecological conflicts and valuation - mangroves vs. shrimp in the late 1990s

4/2001-UHE/UAB-16/05/2001 To be published in Environment and Planning (Goverment and Policy) Ecological Conflicts and Valuation - mangroves vs. shrimp in the late 1990s Joan Martinez-Alier Department of Economics and Economic History Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Edifici B, 08193 – Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain e-mail: [email protected] Abstract Shrimps are produced in two different ways. They are fished in the sea (sometimes at the cost of turtle destruction) or they are "farmed" in ponds in coastal areas. Such aquaculture is increasing around the world as shrimps become a valuable item of world trade. Mangrove forests are sacrificed for commercial shrimp farming. This paper considers the conflict between mangrove conservation and shrimp exports in different countries.Who has title to the mangroves, who wins and who loses in this tragedy of enclosures? Which languages of valuation are used by different actors in order to compare the increase in shrimp exports and the losses in livelihoods and in environmental services? The economic valuation of damages is only one of the possible languages of valuation which are relevant in practice. Who has the power to impose a particular language of valuation? Key words: Mangroves. Shrimps. Ecological distribution conflicts. Tragedy of enclosures.Valuation. Environmentalism of the poor. Trade and environment. Introduction In many coastal areas of the tropical world, in Ecuador, Honduras, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Malaysia, there is social resistance against the introduction of shrimp farming for export, since this implies the uprooting of mangroves in order to build the ponds. In such areas, poor people live sustainably in or near the mangrove forests, by collecting shellfish, by fishing, by making use of mangrove wood for charcoal and building materials. The mangroves are usually public land in all countries, being in the tidal zone, but governments give private concessions for shrimp farming or the land is enclosed illegally by shrimp growers. Illegality is prevalent not only because of the public character of the land, but also because there are often specific environmental laws and court decisions protecting the mangroves as valuable ecosystems. Shrimp or prawn production entails the uprooting of the mangroves, and the loss of livelihood of people living directly from, and also selling, mangrove products. Beyond direct human livelihood, other functions of mangroves are also lost , perhaps irreversibly, such as coastal defence against sea level rise, breeding grounds for fish, carbon sinks, repositories of biodiversity (e.g. genetic resources resistant to salinity), together with aesthetic values. Pollution from the shrimp ponds destroys the local fisheries. Also, wild shrimp disappear 4/2001-UHE/UAB-16/05/2001 because of the loss of breeding grounds in mangroves and because they are overharvested as seed for the ponds. Shrimp aquaculture was strongly supported by the World Bank until the mid-1990s, as part of the drive for non-traditional exports to repay the external debts and to enter the path of export-led growth. The Blue Revolution was going to produce "pink gold". A new world industry of about US$ 10 billion exports per year has indeed been created, at high cost. It is a non-sustainable industry, migrating from place to place, leaving behind a trail of barren landscapes and destitute people. What was traditionally, in some areas, small scale use of marine resources, or traditional aquaculture, became privately owned single-purpose enterprises. Not only mangroves, also some farming areas have been destroyed particularly in India and Bangladesh where small farmers who once harvested rice, millet and other crops near the sea in small plots of land, have been dislodged by force, or by salinization from the encroaching shrimp ponds. In political terms, the conflict between mangrove protection and shrimp industry is an example of two more general competing political regimes, namely global free trade and environmental protection. A main difference from environmental protectionism in the U.S.A. or Europe is that the opposition to mangrove exhaustion and shrimp industrial exploitation is led by poor people, who live from mangroves in a sustainable way. That is to say, mangrove destruction is not only an ecological threat to a valuable ecosystem but also a social threat for them. Hence, the active work of local environmental organisations and local people resistance. External debt pressure on exporting countries, neo-liberal doctrines and ecological blindness of Northern importing consumers together with a flagrant lack of local governmental action to protect the environment in most shrimp producer countries, are the main driving forces of mangrove destruction. These cases are also examples of unequal ecological trade because of environmental and social cost shifting to exporting areas. Although the conflicts analysed below have local scenarios, it is relevant to pay attention to the relationship between local actions (or omissions) and global environmental networks. As it was mentioned above, consumer daily decisions and local governmental permissive attitudes damage ecosystems and people’s livelihoods. On the other side, local action to protect mangroves by poor people trying to preserve their way of life has beneficial consequences for their own survival. It also sets in motion international networks which have a role in global environmental governance. There are then different spatial and temporal scales at which social actors intervine, and there are also different languages of valuation deployed. Local livelihoods are perhaps not a concern of international environmental organisations. Official decision makers may decide that a proper cost-benefit analysis would help them in taking a decision on whether the shrimp industry should be stopped, and they may demand also environmental impact assessments, or they may commission a multi-criteria analysis as an aid to their decision-making. Other stakeholders, such as international environmental organizations or local environmental groups or local groups of inhabitants who do not call themselves environmentalists, may use in practice if not in theory other languages of valuation, and try to implement different procedures of decision-making. At each of the particular locations where the conflict of mangroves vs. shrimp exists, we could ask, which is the value of shrimp compared to the value of lost livelihoods and the value of lost environments? In which metric or metrics should such values be measured? 4/2001-UHE/UAB-16/05/2001 The present paper is based on information from around the world, some of it gathered through participant-observation, most of it from the archives of the environmental organization Acción Ecológica from Ecuador. Ecuador, Honduras and Colombia In the fight against shrimp farming, people who make a living from the mangroves have resorted when circumstances have allowed them to destroy the shrimp ponds, replanting rhizofora seedlings as a symbolic gesture and perhaps with some real hope of reconstructing the vanished mangroves. There have been similar reactions in other contexts, such as the satyagraha "pluck (eucalyptus) and plant (local shrubs and trees)" in Karnataka in the late 1980s (Guha and Martinez-Alier, 1997, chapter 1). Greenpeace participated in a joint action in July 1998 with Fundecol (a local grassroots groups of about 300 people in Muisne, Ecuador), together with some other environmental groups and sympathetic observers (such as myself). This consisted in destroying at sunrise one crop of shrimps from an illegal pond by opening a hole in one wall, letting the water flow out, and replanting mangrove seedlings. The presence of the Rainbow Warrior's motley crew gave the necessary moral strength to the local groups but both the destruction of that particular illegal pond, and the replanting, were ideas proposed earlier by Fundecol. Whether replanting the mangroves is a successful instance of restoration ecology, or whether it results in a much simplified ecosystem, is a controversial issue of importance for assessing the benefits and costs of mangrove destruction by shrimp farming. People who make a living in the mangroves are learning to introduce the words "environment" and "ecology" in their vocabularies of protest. It is the intermediary NGOs which have given an explicit environmental meaning to their livelihood struggles, connecting them into wider networks such as the Mangrove Action Project or the International Shrimp Action Network (ISANet). In Ecuador there was a rumour in early 1999 that shrimp ponds built on destroyed mangroves in public lands over the five previous years were going to become legal private property, or at least that payment of a fee of US$ 1000 per hectare would convert 60 000 ha of illegal ponds built after 1994 into legal 99 years leases (under art 12 of a proposed Law for the Rationalization of Public Finances). Greenpeace, in its campaign against shrimp farming, sent a letter to Ecuador's President, arguing in terms of the livelihood of the local population, the ecological and economic value of the functions of mangroves, and citing also Odum´s and Arding's 1991 analysis of the "emergy" (embodied energy) of mangroves which is dilapidated when they are destroyed (Odum and Arding, 1991). "We are aware of economic research of Ecuador's mangrove ecosystem -wrote on 18 March 1999 Michael Hagler, Greenpeace's ocean and fisheries campaigner, member of the steering committee of ISANetthat has valued the various goods and services provided by such ecosystems to the economy annually at US$ 13 000 per hectare... we fail to see the economic justification of sacrificing tens of billions of dollars of long term economic benefits to be gained over the proposed period of the 99 years leases in order to gain a one-off payment of 60 million dollars in the short term". Greenpeace warned the President of other dangers: new diseases (as actually happened with the "white spot" later in 1999), and the potential for a major eco-conscious consumer backlash against farmed shrimp. An alternative policy was urged on the President, based on coastal ecosystem restoration and preservation, and the bolstering of coastal communities' self-reliance and development. This was supported by Odum's and Arding's accounts of the enormous "emergy" (embodied energy) exports which the shrimp industry represented. Such analysis 4/2001-UHE/UAB-16/05/2001 was corroborated by studies elsewhere in Latin America and in Asian shrimp producing countries. Hence, the Supreme Court of India's order of December 1996 (see below) to close and ban all industrial shrimp aquaculture within the country's coastal regulation zone. The court had accepted evidence which clearly demonstrated that the costs of the harm done to coastal environment and coastal communities far outweighed the value of any benefits, including foreign exchange earnings, that could be attributed to the shrimp industry. One week earlier, Fundecol had distributed a message to international environmental networks couched in a different language. It included (in Spanish) the following call from a woman against what would be described in the United States as "environmental racism": "We have always been ready to cope with everything, and now more than ever, but they want to humiliate us because we are black, because we are poor, but one does not choose the race into which one is born, nor does one choose not to have anything to eat, nor to be ill. But I am proud of my race and of being conchera because it is my race which gives me strength to do battle in defence of what my parents were, and my children will inherit; proud of being conchera because I have never stolen anything from anyone, I have never taken anybody's bread from his mouth to fill mine, because I have never crawled on my knees asking anybody for money, and I have always lived standing up. Now we are struggling for something which is ours, our ecosystem, but not because we are professional ecologists but because we must remain alive, because if the mangroves disappear, a whole people disappears, we all disappear, we shall no longer be part of the history of Muisne, we shall ourselves exist no longer... I do not know what will happen to us if the mangroves disappear, we shall eat garbage in the outskirts of the city of Esmeraldas or in Guayaquil, we shall become prostitutes, I do not know what will happen to us if the mangroves disappear... what I know is that I shall die for my mangroves, even if everything falls down my mangroves will remain, and my children will also stay with me, and I shall fight to give them a better life than I have had... We think, if the camaroneros who are not the rightful owners nevertheless now prevent us and the carboneros from getting through the lands they have taken, not allowing us to get across the esteros, shouting and shooting at us, what will happen next, when the government gives them the lands, will they put up big "Private Property" signs, will they even kill us with the blessing of the President?".1 Killing threats must be understood literally even in Ecuador, which has been an island of peace between Colombia and Peru. In Honduras (Stonich, 1991) the conservation of mangroves has exacted a price in human lives such as those of Israel Ortiz Avila and Marín Zeledonio Alvarado killed on October 4, 1997 in an area called "La Iguana". The movement in Honduras has been successful because of the effectiveness of Coddeffagolf (Comité para la Defensa y Desarrollo de la Flora y fauna del Golfo de Fonseca) led by Jorge Varela, recipient of the Goldman Prize in 1999. An international meeting in Honduras in 1996 (with representatives from Latin America, the United States, India, Sweden) had issued the Declaration of Choluteca (16 October 1996) asking for a worldwide moratorium on shrimp farming. After the deaths of October 1997, Varela stated: "Today, the artisanal fishermen cannot move freely across the swamps and mangroves where before they found their livelihood (sustento), for the camaroneros have appropriated not only the land concessions 1Message from [email protected] of 11 March 1999. Concheras are women who collects shellfish (Anadara tuberculosa) mostly for selling, also for subsistance. Camaroneros are the owners of the shrimp ponds (camaron being the shrimp). Carboneros are charcoal makers. Concheras get across esteros (the swamps) by boat to get to the mangroves and collect the shells at low tide. The population of the province of Esmeraldas in Ecuador is in its majority of African descent. 4/2001-UHE/UAB-16/05/2001 granted to them by the government but also the surrounding areas. With the complicity of our government, we have given away our people's patrimony to a few national and foreign individuals, and we have deprived thousands of persons of their livelihood. We have turned the blood of our people into an appetizer...".2 Such statements from Honduras and Ecuador carry the implication that human life and human dignity have dimensions which ellude money valuation. The appropriate languages are livelihood, food security, human rights, community territorial rights, and not "the internalization of externalities" in the price system, or the "polluter pays principle", or "cost-benefit" analysis. Mangroves are also under threat at various points in other central American countries. In San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico, local groups fight against gigantic projects for shrimp farming and for tourism involving the destruction of thousands of hectares of mangroves, particularly a project by Granjas Aquanova.3 Even in eco-friendly Costa Rica there was the intention of changing in 1998 the legislation protecting mangroves so as to allow shrimp aquaculture permitting the construction of channels through the mangroves to provide shrimp ponds both with access to sea water and convenient discharge points for pond effluent. Greenpeace and other members of ISANet urged Costa Rican legislators to oppose this change.4 In the Pacific Coast of Colombia pressure by the shrimp industry is increasing, though mangroves have been mostly preserved until now. Very near the border with Ecuador, in Tumaco (so far, a relatively peaceful corner of Colombia), sustainable extraction of shells sold locally or to Ecuador is part of the everyday economy of a few thousand women. On both sides of the border, the defense of the mangroves is connected to the birth of an AfricanAmerican movement in a vigorous process of "ethnogenesis" (as shown by Grueso et al 1997). There is much contact among family members across the Colombia-Ecuador border in this area. On both sides of the border, women are the main losers when mangroves are converted into shrimp farms, because they lose access to a communal source of food and cash income, in a pattern well known from other ecological distribution conflicts around the world related to access to water, fuelwood, pasture lands... (Agarwal, 1992).In Tumaco, one local cooperative has been successful in settting up small-scale shrimp farming (with ponds of about one hectare, instead of 10 ha), though industrial shrimp growers predominate, and they exercise increasing pressure to build large shrimp ponds. Pressure of exports on local resources is visible also from plantations of oil palms along the coast on both sides of the border and inland from the mangrove area. Local leaders are against such external pressures and they convey a doctrine of sustainable use of the mangroves. Thus, an interview in Tumaco with Jose Joaquin Castro, leader of Asocarlet (the association of charcoal makers, who sell it for local consumption), elicited a description in the late 1990s of the bugeoning conflict in the following terms: "The mangroves are part of our culture, as you can see. From the time the first slaves arrived here, what they found as an alternative for livelihood was the wide mangrove forest, and today, when we are moving out of the 20th century towards the 21st century, the mangroves still subsist despite development. For us in the Pacific Coast, the priority are the mangroves as 2Journal La Tribuna , section Ecocomentarios, 29 October 1997, also website Environment in latin America at CSF, 9 November 1997. 3Email from Grupo Ecológico Manglar, San Blas, Nayarit, 27 April 1998. 4 Letter from Matthew Gianni, Oceans Campaign Coordinator, Greenpeace International, to Hon. Rafael Villalta Loaiza, 5 october 1998. 4/2001-UHE/UAB-16/05/2001 a means of subsistence, as a means of protection. From the mangroves we obtain our food, and the charcoal for cooking food, and also the wood to build our homes which are 80 per cent mangrove wood. The young mangroves are not cut down. We cut in one zone today, we come back in one year, and there is new material to be cut. If we keep the mangroves, then we have fish, we have shrimp, we have crabs. But the industrial camaroneros started to invade our lands, without asking us, the Negro people, not taking into account that this is the terrain of the charcoal maker, the wood collector, the concheras, the fishermen. They surveyed the area from the air, flying over it and making topographic measurements, then they asked for concessions from the State of one thousand or more hectares each, and they cut and uprooted all the mangroves, then the mangroves will not grow again. They did not take into account that behind this strip of mangroves there are many families who obtain their livelihood from them, and without any piety at all, they displaced the charcoal maker, and the fishermen... They put up notices of "private property".5 So, despite the fact that property rights on the mangrove forests are legally clearly established in favour of the State, and despite the fact that there has been a traditional usage by local communities, the shrimp growers attempt to change the property rights to their own benefit. This is locally perceived as a social and environmental "tragedy of enclosures" not only in Ecuador, Honduras, Colombia but also in other places around the world where similar conflicts have arisen. Shrimp farming in South and South-East Asia While Ecuador was producing about 105 000 metric tons of shrimp in 1995 (of which about 95 per cent farmed, and only 5 per cent fished), other giants of the industry were Thailand and Indonesia, the first one with 330 000 tons (of which 67 per cent farmed), the second one with 195 000 (of which 41 per cent farmed). Vietnam is rapidly increasing its farmed shrimp production. India and Bangladesh are important producers but opposition is strong in both countries. China is an important producer, and Taiwan's industry flourished in the 1970s, and then declined. The world total production of shrimp was in 1995, 2 607 000 tons of which 712 000 tons farmed and 1 895 000 fished. The trend is towards an increase in farmed shrimp, and a decrease of wild caught shrimp because of overexploitation of fisheries and because of turtle protection.6 In the Philippines, aquaculture activities were primarily responsible for the clearing of more than 338 000 ha of mangrove forest since 1968, and seriously affected the coastal fisheries catch (Gopinath and Gabriel, 1997:201). Broad and Cavanagh (1993: 114-115) reported: "Eliodoro 'Ely' de la Rosa, a forty-three year old father of five, had been a fisherman and a leader of the fishers' group LAMBAT... Ely was deeply concerned that Manila Bay was dying, that there would be no fish for his children and grandchildren. He talked of his organization's efforts to halt the destruction of the coastal mangroves. He spoke eloquently of the dangers of prawn pond expansion, of the need to stand up to the prawn-pond owners and other mangrove destroyers, and of his plans to start a mangrove replanting program. For his visions and for his ability to inspire others to take action against the impediments to these 5 Interview by Martha Luz Machado, reported in Patricia Falla, Estado actual y tendencias en el manejo del ecosistema manglar por comunidades del Pacífico colombiano, Master's Thesis, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, July 2000. 6Shrimp News International, an industry publication issued by Bob Rosenberry, San Diego, calif. 4/2001-UHE/UAB-16/05/2001 visions, he was murdered" (on 22 January 1990). (For the general context in the Philippines, Primavera, 1991). In Thailand, despite the opposition of environmental groups such as Yadfon in Trang province, the destruction of mangroves has followed a familiar pattern. Ponds have an average life-span of less than five years: "shrimp farmers simply march down the coastline, leaving hundreds of miles of poisonous brown blotches in their wake. The ponds saturate the surrounding soil with salt and pollute the land and water with a chemical sludge made up of fertilizer and antibiotics as well as larvicides, shrimp feed and waste" (Mydans, 1996). In Malaysia, where twenty per cent of the available mangroves have been slated for aquaculture development, there are artisanal fishermen's movements in some parts of the country trying to stop industrial fishing and also the destruction of mangroves. Thus, in Penang, an association led by Haji Saidin Hussain resorted in the mid-1990s to replanting mangrove seedlings outside the large Penshrimp farm. The association takes a stand on many issues: overfishing by trawlers near the coast, shrimp aquaculture, mangrove destruction, toxic dumping, and even tourist development (Ahmed, 1997: 25-26). In some areas, the value of the mangrove forest products has played a role in averting the conversion of remaining mangroves into shrimp ponds, and to this is added an interesting sustainable alternative, the culture of clams in the mudflats as practiced in the Matang mangrove reserve, with no infrastructure requirements, no feeds or chemicals. The clams feed on the detritus produced by the mangroves, and this alternative relies of naturally produced clam "seeds" (Gopinath and Gabriel, 1997: 201-202). In Bangladesh the coastal shrimp farms are located in the Cox's Bazaar district in the east, and Satkhira, Khulna and Bagerhat districts in the west, where large landowners have appropriated the lands of small farmers and turned them into shrimp farms, with loss of trees and fodder, scarcity of potable water, and salinization of fields. There are also movements by fishermen who complain against the loss of fisheries: "They are creating alternatives. They want to fill all the ponds with soil and plant mangroves" (Ahmed, 1997: 19). In the Chakaria Sunderbans, in Cox's Bazaar, some 50 000 acres of mangroves have been converted into shrimp ponds since the early 1980s, with initial support from the World Bank. Television reports of flooding and loss of life in Bangladesh are not uncommon in Northern homes, but the connection to destroyed mangroves, abandoned shrimp farms, and decreased coastal defence against cyclones is not often made. Deforestation has left the area highly vulnerable to sea water intrusion when cyclones strike. Thus, the lack of food security because of the enclosure of the mangroves in order to produce a luxury export product such as shrimps is compounded by environmental insecurity. There have been some deaths in shrimp conflicts in Bangladesh, the most famous that of Karunamoi Sardar who died on 7 November 1990 defending her village of Horinkhola, in Khulna. That village and some surrounding villages have been declared themlsevs a "shrimpfree" zone, and every November 7 thousands of peasants gather there in memory of Karumanoi Sardar and solidarity with her village's resistance against the shrimp industry (Ahmed, 1997:15). In Indonesia there is still a plan in the year 2000, under the name Protekan 2003, to increase shrimp production at the expense of mangroves in the next three years, occupying an extra 320 000 ha, after a viral disease destroyed most of Indonesia's shrimp production in 1995. In 4/2001-UHE/UAB-16/05/2001 comparison, shrimp ponds in Ecuador (the largest Latin American producer), whether active or already abandoned, occupy 210 000 ha. Land to be used for shrimp production in Indonesia is often taken away from mangrove forests or from villagers by force and physical violence. Clashes will undoubtedly take place in the new, more democratic atmosphere.7 The pressure for increasing shrimp farming comes from the demand in rich countries, and from the decline in the sea shrimp fishery. In Indonesia most of the shrimp ponds originally concentrated in the north coast of Java where mangrove forest were destroyed between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s. Nowadays, most of these ponds are abandoned because of low productivity and environmental degradation, and there is a search for new frontiers. The largest mangrove forests in Indonesia (more than half of about 4 million ha) are in West Papua. The Protekan 2003 plan looks towards the south coast of Sulawesi, Kalimantan, Maluku... Some of the largest shrimp entrepreneus in Indonesia are Thai firms, in a characteristic migrating pattern after destroying their own mangroves. These firms use sometimes a "nucleus-satellite" contracting system, buying the farmed shrimp from local suppliers. In India, commercial shrimp farming started with a US$ 425 million loan from the World Bank in the mid-1980s, to which government subsidies were added. As in Bangladesh and other countries, the shrimp farms invade not only mangroves but also agricultural areas near the sea in states such as Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Former farms become salinized and without further agricultural use once the shrimp farms fall into disuse. Pumps and pipes to draw sea water into the ponds and channels to discharge polluted water, interfere with the fishermen's tasks. Groundwater is also polluted. In India, "responding to this destruction of their livelihoods, landless and impoverished coastal dwellers took their struggle for justice to the streets, the state-level bodies and finally to the courtroom" (Ahmed, 1997:4). In December 1996, the Supreme Court of India delivered a remarkable verdict. The court comprised judge Kuldip Singh, the litigation was filed by the noted elderly Gandhian S. Jagannathan together with an NGO called Prepare, and it was argued by lawyer M. C. Metha. The court ordered the closure of all commercial aquaculture operations within 500 metres of the high tide line, or within 1000 metres of the coast of Lake Chilika in Orissa, forbidding shrimp farms in converted agricultural areas also beyond such limits. The verdict directed that the prawn farms should treat their workers as "retrenched", in the meaning of the Industrial Disputes Act. They should be paid a compensation equal to six years' wages, as ordered (also by judge Kuldip Singh) in the case of workers in polluting industries in Delhi which opted for closure instead of relocation. The decision rested on a Cost-Benefit Analysis commissioned by the court and carried out by NEERI (the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute). The export earnings ("forex") were given a premium value. Nevertheless NEERI calculated (in monetary terms) that India's prawn industry in 1994 generated four times as much environmental damage as the value of its export earnings. As remarked above, the results of such exercises in cost-benefit analysis will depend very much on the time horizon considered, on the discount rate applied, and on the fictitious values chosen for extra-market costs and benefits.The court's decision was not only based on this cost-benefit analysis (whose results went against shrimp farming) but also on studies of environmental impact and other considerations. The decision has not been really implemented 7 Raja Siregar (Friends of the Earth), Indonesia to intensify shrimp farming, Link, 90:6, 1999. Also, Raja Siregar and Emmy Hafild (Friends of the Earth International/WALHI), Global Shrimp Trade and Indonesian Shrimp Farming Policies, typewritten report, Jakarta, November 1999 (20 pages). 4/2001-UHE/UAB-16/05/2001 since subsequent legislation was more permissive. However, it helped the resistance movement against shrimp farming not only in India but around the world. The NGO Prepare, led by Jacob Raj from Chemnai, organized a very large gathering in Delhi in November 1998 - the International People's Conference against Industrial Shrimp and Trade. Prepare has also tried to set up a south-south network. True, a small network based on the North (the Mangrove Action Project led by Alfredo Quarto) has carried out a long and strong struggle defending local populations and promoting "silvofisheries" (that is, supporting traditional fisheries while preserving mangrove forests), but a larger network, ISANet set in the mid-1990s was (from Jacob Raj's point of view) not radical enough. It was too far from the grassroots, too much inclined to negotiations with the shrimp industry at international meetings. Hence the attempt to create this south-south network, the initial stimulus coming from India. The movement in India against industrial shrimp farming involves displaced peasants, as in Bangladesh, but it is also part of a large movement for the defence of artisanal fisheries active both in the west coast, in Kerala particularly, and also in the east coast. It comprises hundreds of thousands of fishworkers who complain against trawlers which fish in the deep sea and discard large quantities of fish caught in the trawl -a baglike net dragged by the vesseland which export part of their catch. Trawlers are often owned by joint venture firms, with foreign participation. On 4 February 1994 there was a strike organized by the national Fishworkers' Forum, a federation of small-scale, artisanal fishermen of all coastal states in India. There was no fishing or unloading of fish during the strike. The same movement recently dennounced the tensions caused by the expansion of shrimp production in Chilika Lake in Orissa, where there are new developments after fishermen successfully forced Tata industries to withdraw their plans for aquaculture in the early 1990s. On 11 June 1999, four fishworkers, including one woman, demonstrating against illegal prawn farms, were killed by the police.8 Mangroves threatened in East Africa Outside South and South East Asia and Latin America (where large mangrove forests in Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil are still intact), the shrimp frontier advances also in East Africa. In Tanzania, a project by the African Fishing Company for almost 10 000 ha of prawn farming in the Rufiji Delta has given rise to much opposition. A previous projects had been proposed by NORAD, a Norwegian private company, and the Bagamoyo Development Corporation in the early 1990s. It was not implemented. It led to the dismissal for corrumption of the Minister of Lands - "the Minister had attempted to insert himself into the venture by allocating the land reserved for construction of the prawn farm to a business partner" (Gibbon, 1997:81). The Rufiji Delta contains some 20 islands and 31 villages with more than 40 000 people, it is famed for supporting the largest continuous block of mangrove forests (53 000 ha) in East Africa. "The Rufiji Delta is one of the most physically stunning areas in Africa. Over an area of perhaps 1 500 square kilometres a web of rivers and channels intersect seemingly endless mangrove stands, interrupted occasionally by rice fields" (Gibbon, 1997:5). In this area there is fishing of wild-caught prawns. Conflicts between artisanal fishermen and trawlers have been researched by Peter Gibbon (1997). The prawn farming project introduced a new type of 8 Email from Thomas Kocherry, coordinator, World Forum of Fish-Harvesters and Fish-Workers. 4/2001-UHE/UAB-16/05/2001 among several, legitimate as a point of view and as a refelection of real power structures.Who has then the power to impose a particular language of valuation? As the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy asked in 1999, "which is the cost of living" in the Narmada valley, in which currency must it be paid? Or as a Human Rights Watch report asked in 1999, which is "the price of oil" in the Niger Delta? References Agarwal, Bina, The gender and environment debate: lessons from India, Feminist Studies, 18(1), 1992. Ahmed, Faris, In Defence of Land and Livelihood. Coastal Communities and the Shrimp Industry in Asia, Consumers' Association of Penang, CUSO, InterPares, Sierra Club of Canada, Ottawa and Penang, 1997. Broad, Robin and John Cavanagh, Plundering Paradise. 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