Looking Back: Shrimp farmers and the tsunami
Fish Farmer, March/April 2005
On 26 December 2004, an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra triggered a tsunami which devastated communities all around the Indian Ocean, killing well over 200,000 people.
The Boxing Day tsunami, as it became known, was one of the deadliest natural disasters in history. Not surprisingly, as Fish Farmer reported, the tsunami wreaked havoc on shrimp farmers along the coast of Tamil Dau, in India. An estimated 600 shrimp farms were devastated – with an added complication that, as shrimp aquaculture was officially banned in the state, little or no help was forthcoming from government.
Environmentalists, meanwhile, argued that by removing sand dunes to create brackish ponds for the shrimp, the farmers had actually made the impact of the tsunami even worse.
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