Prawn farmers lose out in fight against pollution
By Sri Wahyuni
TEGAL, Central Java (JP): Local fishpond farmers can now only reminisce about the days when breeding scampi was a lucrative business that they thought could last forever.
Today, pollution and drought are the greatest obstacles in the survival of the business.
"For three, 0.6 hectare ponds, I used to make a net profit of Rp 100 million (US$50,000) in a single harvest," a farmer said of his success in the early 1990s, the golden years of the then promising export commodity.
His success encouraged others to try their luck in the business. Hundreds of hectares of fishponds and dry land were converted into prawn ponds, but have now ended in failure.
Sukrad, 58, a farmer in Muarareja village in Tegal municipality, was among those who failed. He began breeding prawns in 1994 but gave up two years later due to bankruptcy.
"I had only four harvests, and none of them gave me significant profit," said Sukrad, who is also the village chief. He lost Rp 30 million in bank loans and another Rp 70 million which he raised by selling a piece of his land.
"I haven't finished repaying my debt even now," he said.
Local farmers said business declined because the ponds were polluted and were no longer suitable for growing prawns.
They blamed a developer of a housing complex that allegedly reclaimed land using garbage, waste from salted-fish home industries and from a nearby ice factory.
Based on farmers' complaint, the local fishery office recently examined the water quality.
"(Pollution) of the water has not reached a toxic level," said head of the municipality's Fishery Service Office Samtoro Putro. He did elaborate.
The farmers, of course, had different opinions. They said that even the lowest level of pollution in the water could "stress" prawns and make them sick.
"Taking care of a human baby would be much easier than taking care of prawns," said one farmer.
This explains why once a prawn was found floating dead in the water farmers would harvest the whole pond, no matter how small the prawns were, to prevent further financial loss.
"Prawns are cannibals. They eat the dead ones. Then they easily catch the same disease," another farmer explained.
Unavoidable
Samtoro, however, said there was nothing anybody could do.
He said the Tegal municipality had been established as a fish catching, not fish breeding, region. Some processes such as drying and salting the fish unavoidably caused pollution.
There are about 500 hectares of fishponds in the municipality, half of them located in Muarareja where almost 600 farmers breed either fish or scampi. The rest are scattered in the villages of Tegalsari, Panggung and Mintaraga.
The official conceded there had been a sharp decline in the municipality's prawn production over the past few years. In 1995, for example, the municipality produced nearly 100 tons of prawns, harvested from about 100 hectares of ponds still used to farm scampi. In 1996, the figure dropped by half.
In the early 1990s, a one-hectare pond could yield three tons of "super-size" scampi, also known as size 30 because a kilogram consists of 30 prawns.
"The total production this year will certainly be less than last year," Samtoro said.
The same problem occurred in the Tegal regency, which now has 300 hectares of ponds and is expected to only generate Rp 1 billion from the scampi business.
Munir, a farmer from Kramat district, recalled how scampi farming used to be an easy job. "All you had to do was throw the baby prawns into the water. The rest would be just waiting until harvest time," he said.
In the heyday of scampi farming, it would only take 100 days for baby prawns to grow into super-size scampi. Now, farmers consider themselves lucky if they can harvest size 60 prawns in the same period. Even size 60 prawns need additional vitamins, antiviruses and the water must be chemically treated.
"During the golden days of the business, the regency could contribute three times as much to the national income," said Slamet Sophan, the head of the production section of the regency's fishery office.
He said one reason was the soil's declining fertility, after more than 10 years of cultivation.
One solution, he said, was to plant less baby prawns in a pond. Another was to breed fish and prawns alternately.
Another reason for the predicted decline in prawn production was the drought. Hundreds of hectares of ponds in the region have either dried up or are severely lacking fresh water.
The hardest hit are the districts of Suradadi, Kramat, Warureja and West Tegal, the traditional major fish and prawn producing areas.
Farmers with more than two ponds, each usually about half a hectare and the necessary equipment such as diesel pumps, could usually overcome the difficulty. Those with enough capital could take another option, namely find ponds in other, more fertile areas such as the southern coastal districts of Klirong, Ayah and Buayan, in Kebumen regency, about 200 kilometers away.
Those who don't, will have to wait until the rain comes.