farmers

FIVE years ago farmers big and small jostled to get into aquaculture and raise shrimps in coastal Andhra Pradesh. But the tide seems to have gone out for these entrepreneurs with the Supreme Court order that they close down or face the bulldozers. The industry got a brief reprieve when a division bench of the apex court stayed its won order till April 30.

The stay was good news for the district authorities in the coastal belt who lacked the money and machinery to raze the farms. "How does one destroy a prawn farm?" asked Chitra Ramachandran, collector Krishna district. "It will cost about Rs 30 crore to destroy the farms in each district. We will have to hire bulldozers to destroy the tanks and fill them in."

The bulldozers will be wrecking the hopes of thousands of farmers who had tasted success with aquafarming. "The sea-face economy has changed for the better and people in this belt are seeing money for the first time, " said Chitra. The last five years had brought prosperity to the coastal areas where about 1.2 lakh hectares came under aquaculture.

Chitra and the other district collectors fear violence in the dusty streets once the bulldozers move in. Groups representing the farmers have formed suicide squads and threaten to fight to the finish for their farms. "Our world will collapse as will out dreams," said Mukhu Raja, an aqua farmer. "But we will never allow this to happen."

Worst affected by the court order will be Krishna district, which has 77,000 acres under aquaculture. A newly formed outfit called the Krishna Zilla Royalla Tayutu Sangam organised a string of rallies here and made life difficult for the authorities. The show of strength has been peaceful so far but the mood may change once the bulldozers go on the rampage.

T.V Bhaskara Rao, the spokesman of the Sangam, warned that the agitation will not stop till the court reverses its order. He claimed to have the backing of the Chandrababu Naidu government in his efforts to win a fresh lease of life for the industry. According to Rao villages like Kona, 8 km from Machilipatnam, have been transformed by the profits from aquafarming. The streets o Kona, which had just two bicycles a year ago, are jammed with mopeds owned by aqua farmer.

Another success story is barren Patheru, which had only seen poverty and, once in a while, a tidal wave. The lives of the villagers changed after the Scheduled Caste Corporation and a non-government organisation called Casa gave them an acre each for aqua farming.

After the very first crop the farmers were able to clear their debts and send their children to school. Many of them were planning to move into concrete houses when they were asked to close shop. Not surprisingly, this village of 150 families is determined to save its one-acre farms, come hell or high water.

But not if the environmentalist have their way. They had been voicing their concern over the proliferation of the aqua farms, which apparently wrought havoc with the environment. S. Jagannathan, an octogenarian environmentalist from Tamil Nadu, had filed the writ petition in the Supreme Court in 1994 that led to the resounding verdict on December 11, 1996.

The verdict was based on a report the court had directed the National Environment Engineering Research Institute, NEERI, to prepare. The court not only ordered all aquaculture farms operating or set up in the Coastal Regulatory Zone (CRZ) to be demolished but also asked its owners to pay six year's wages as compensation to their workers.

The ban applied to farming in mangroves, estuaries, wetlands, salt pans and public lands. The court instructed even those industries that had closed down to pay compensation for eco-restoration and to the affected local population.

AQUACULTURE became a craze in the coastal districts after the pioneers started making huge profits from their farms. As its popularity spread, the Marine Products Export Development Authority, MPEDS, shifted to more central Vijayawada from Machilipatnam. It encouraged the fledgling industry without checking on the environmental aspects.

People who had no idea of fishing converged on the coastal areas. The job was easy, investments not so heavy and returns whopping. It was a safe industry that did not damage the environment. In fact, it found the salinity level in the areas under aquafarming normal.

Interestingly, NEERI hit the panic button when it did a second study for the Supreme Court. It projected aquaculture as highly pollution industry and included that the returns were meager compared with the damage being caused to the coast line.

"The second NEERI study for the Supreme Court was conducted when there was a crop holiday," said Bhaskara Rao, who has 30 acres under aqua cultivation. A crop holiday is the period when the farms are left fallow after harvest.

"How can it give two different reports, one to the MPEDA and the other to the Supreme Court?" asked a farmer. "The court is not allowing any review petition. That is also very fair." The farmer complained that the court had not consulted the state governments before issuing orders to the collector and district police officers to destroy or close the aqua farms before March 31. That would be a Herculean task, considering that the industry is in the unorganised sector.

Aqua farmers claimed that the water they used was already contaminated with wastes from other industries and the drainage systems.

"Once the water enters the fish tanks we cause the sediment to settle by adding lime," said Rao. "We then stock our seeds here and feed them. If this water which we let out into the sea were polluted the prawns would have died-they are very sensitive creatures."

Farmers like Rao insist that even the effluents from the industry are bio-degradable or not, once aquafarming folds up it will take down with it a host of ancillary industries such as ice plants, transport, feeds cement pipe and bamboo.

Meanwhile, the Andhra Pradesh government changed its coastal regulatory zone guidelines to redefine the banks of rivers, creeks and backwaters with reference to the High Tide Line. The government claimed that it would bail out 50,000 farmers. But since the court has ordered the closure of all aqua farms such cosmetic changes will not make any difference.

A new authority

THE industry got a reprieve when a division bench of the Supreme Court stayed the demolition of all prawn aquaculture farms till April 30. The earlier order had called for the demolition of all aqua farms within the coastal regulatory zone (CRZ) and within 500 meters of the sea on the grounds that they had severely damaged the ecologically fragile coast.

The stay was granted by the bench after Attorney General Ashok Desai submitted that demolition would affect the livelihood of lakhs of people. The court directed the listing of the review petitions for hearing on April 25.

The court also ordered the setting up of an authority under the Environmental Protection Act to study the industry along India's 7,000-km coastline. The authority, to be headed by a retired judge, has been entrusted with the task of prescribing regulations for the construction and operation of aquaculture farms and granting licences.

Meanwhile, in a bid to speed up controls on shrimp farming, the Aquaculture Authority Bill, 1997, has been passed by the Rajya Sabha and introduced in the Lok Sabha. The proposed bill aims to regulate shrimp farming in an eco-friendly manner.

Thought the industry has got a breather, Bhaskara Rao is not in a mood to celebrate the stay.

"The farmers will be tense till the ruling comes," he said. "That will take one more month. They cannot stock up on the prawns though this is the season, because they have to wait for the court order. So this entire season will go waste and they will not make any money."

Besides, the farmers' groups will have to spend a lot of time explaining their position to the newly-appointed authority. "Then spend more money on lawyers for the April 20 hearing," said Rao.