Rakhine prawn farms on the brink

Prawn farmers in Rakhine State say they are facing economic ruin as a decade-long decline in yields shows no sign of abating.

Rakhine Fishery Federation vice chairman U San Hla Kyaw said yields have fallen by 75 percent over 10 years and that this has driven as many as one-third of the state’s prawn farmers out of business.

Despite the lower competition, however, those still farming are seeing yields continuing to decline.Unlike prawn farmers in Yangon Region who can stock up on hatchlings from nurseries, Rakhine farmers rely on wild prawns to restock their ponds. Prawn farms have become so unprofitable that they cannot afford to invest in hatcheries, farmers said.

The farms yielded about 40 kilograms an acre per harvest a decade ago, but this has fallen to about 10kg per acre on average and as low as 4kg per acre at some farms, U San Hla Kyaw said. Prawn farms have two harvests a year.

The number of prawn farms has also fallen by about a third in one year, farmers in the state said. U San Hla Kyaw said the number of ponds had fallen from about 155,000 last year to about 110,000 this year. Low yields also meant that farmers can no longer survive with prawn farms of 30-40 acres.

U Maung Maung, a farmer in Rakhine State’s Minbya township, said plenty of workers are needed for harvesting and farmers can no longer afford this because yields are too low. “We no longer make a profit,” he said.

Prawn farms in Rakhine rely on larvae caught in the wild and this led to a depletion of wild prawns as the number of farms expanded over the last decade, U San Hla Kyaw said. “The environment will be destroyed if we continue to catch so heavily from the wild,” he added. U Hnin Oo, chairman of the Myanmar Shrimp Association, said Rakhine’s prawn production has plunged because the amount of prawn larvae caught in the wild has fallen by about two-thirds.

“Catches of wild Tiger prawn have plunged so production is less than half what it was,” U Hnin Oo said. This problem is confined to Rakhine State, he added. Farmers in Yangon Region’s Kyauktan township, for example, can harvest up to 5 tonnes a hectare (2.4 acres) of Pacific white shrimp and because they rely on hatcheries their production level is steady.

source: The Myanmar Times

http://www.mmtimes.com/index.php/business/7358-rakhine-prawn-farms-on-the-brink.html