Shrimp Factories instead of Rice Farms

The New York Times has an interesting article today on Indian agriculture and its current inability to produce enough rice. wheat and vegetable oil for its population. The article does highlight some of the systemic problems facing the country.

The article, however, omits one key fact- significant number of farmers in India (especially along the coast) have removed the good soil in their arable land, filled it with sea water and are growing various varieties of shrimp. The large government subsidies given to farmers in U.S. and in Europe for many years have kept the prices of rice and wheat in India at a level where the Indian farmers could not make enough return on their labors. Some of these farmers realized that growing shrimp and exporting to the West produced much better returns. Large areas of arable land that produced rice are converted to shrimp production. The coastal part of Andhra Pradesh was composed of rice paddy fields- now it is hard to find much green on the map, instead one finds a lot of blue. (Image thanks to Google Earth).

Now, even though grain prices are soaring, it is not easy to re-convert the shrimp farm to arable land for growing grains. As China has entered the shrimp export market in a big way as well, shrimp prices have fallen significantly, and this has created a sea of problems for the Indian farmer who is in a pickle. The tragedy is that 50% or more of the Indian population is primarily vegetarian- consequently the domestic market for shrimp is limited.

Indian business folks are notorious for gravitating rapidly towards any situation where they can make a quick buck. In this case, farmers who previously produced enough rice for themselves and some more for sale are now buying the grains in stores at very high prices, while seeing their incomes shrink.

A 'shrimp' of a tale, indeed!