Sea of Cortez Shrimp Farms Struggle Under Their Own Toxic Burden Erik Vance - Harper's Magazine
go to original August 23, 2013

A worker at a shrimp farm vacuums waste from a pond, Sea of Cortez, Mexico. (Dominic Bracco II)

Last Thursday, Mexican officials announced that the country’s shrimp farms were in a state of emergency. According to news reports, a combination of heavy-metal pollution and widespread disease in the hundreds of thousands of acres of shrimp farms lining the Sea of Cortez has torpedoed this summer’s crop.

An estimated 90 percent of Mexico’s shrimp farms are on the Sea of Cortez, and they have struggled for years with a series of diseases. When Dominic Bracco and I arrived in Kino to report our story for the August issue of Harper’s, producers were still working to recover. “You see these ponds?” asked Alfonso Apodaca Vazquez, a manager at the La Borbolla shrimp farm. “There are about twelve shrimp per square meter. Usually there are at least thirty.”

The problem isn’t limited to Mexico. China, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, all huge producers of shrimp for the United States, have struggled with something called early mortality syndrome (EMS) in shrimp. It’s not clear yet if the same affliction is hitting Mexican shrimp, but the news reports suggested that shrimp in the Sea of Cortez’s ponds die are dying before they are thirty days old. (Shrimp need a few months, at a minimum, to be big enough to eat.)

Read the rest at Harper’s Magazine

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