Shrimp Farming in Sinaloa, Mexico

On April 3, 2008, at the World Wildlife Fund’s Shrimp Dialogue Meeting in Belize City, Belize, I interviewed Sergio Escutia and Carlos Urías, shrimp farmers from the state of Sinaloa in Mexico. Sergio is also President of COADES (the Confederation of Aquaculture Organizations in Sinaloa, the Confederación de Organizaciones Acuícolas del Estado de Sinaloa) and Carlos is also President of CESASIN (the Sinaloa State Aquatic Health Committee, the Comité Estatal de Sanidad Acuícola de Sinaloa).

For some of my questions, Carlos provided the information in Spanish, and Sergio translated it into English. Carlos also answered some of my questions in English, and he supplied the charts and tables that you’ll see below.

Sergio Escutia: Carlos has been farming shrimp in the Guasave area of northern Sinaloa since 1999. He’s also president of the Aquatic Health Committee in Sinaloa. Under the direction of SENASICA (the National Service for Animal Health, Food Safety and Quality, the Servicio Nacional de Sanidad, Inocuidad y Calidad Agroalimentaria), every state in Mexico with an important aquaculture industry has an aquatic health committee. Shrimp farmers must join their state committees and comply with the aquatic health regulations through a local aquatic health board (Junta Local de Sanidad Acuícola). The boards of the committees include representatives from academia and state and federal governments. The committees have really changed shrimp farming in Mexico. Since they got going in 2004, we’ve been able to manage shrimp diseases in Mexico much better than in the past. In 2008, the aquatic health committee in Sinaloa has a budget of close to $1.5 million. The Federal Government, the State Government and the farmers each contribute around one-third of the funds. You know how hard it is to get money from farmers. Well, in this case, they put up the money voluntarily, which means they trust the committees. The management of the committees in the states is done by democratically elected farmers in each region. Carlos is the President of the Sinaloa state Aquatic Health Committee.

Since the industry must also deal with matters other than health, like taxes, markets and national and international regulations, we realized that we also needed a state farmers association in Sinaloa. We got together organizations already working in the state and representatives from areas without organizations and formed the Confederation of Aquaculture Organizations in Sinaloa (COADES), following the same structure of the Aquatic Health Committees. COADES represents the most important local aquaculture organizations in Sinaloa. Its board consists of one member from each of the local aquaculture associations in Sinaloa. It’s a young organization, but we have made progress in the first year. Sonora and some other states have similar organizations. I’m president of the association in Sinaloa. I’m also vice-president of the Aquaculture Section in CANAINPESCA, the National Fisheries Industry Chamber in Mexico. COADES works with CANAINPESCA mainly on federal issues.

Shrimp News: Tell me a little about your background and how you got into shrimp farming.

Sergio Escutia: When I was a kid, maybe ten years old, extreme high tides would flood the drainage canals of our cattle ranch, turning them from fresh to brackish and creating an ideal nursery for the shrimp larvae they carried. When those larvae got larger, I would capture them for fishing bait. I did not identify them, but I guess they were Penaeus stylirostris or P. vannamei. I never forgot those shrimp.

In 1983, I started college at the Monterrey Institute of Technology, studying agriculture engineering with a specialization in animal husbandry. At the library, I discovered some of the early publications on fish farming and freshwater prawn farming (Macrobrachium rosenbergii). There was not much information about shrimp farming at that time. I decided to get a master’s degree in aquaculture after I got my undergraduate degree in agriculture. But that summer while cleaning out my bedroom, I found some interesting information about another campus of the same university and changed my major to biochemical engineering, with a specialization in aquaculture. About a year before graduation, my father and I got serious about starting a shrimp farm on family land.

Everyone told us it wouldn’t work because our land was right on the ocean on sandy soil, while the rest of the shrimp farms in the western hemisphere were on brackish water estuaries. No one in the western hemisphere had done shrimp farming right on the ocean before. In 1988, I went to Taiwan and later to Ecuador, two of the biggest producers of farmed shrimp at the time. The farms in Ecuador were all on estuaries, but those in Taiwan were right on the ocean. In 1989, using the best ideas from the East and the West, my father and I created a hybrid system. We stocked our first one-hectare pond and harvested 5.5 metric of shrimp tons five months later, most of it 25-gram shrimp. That was the beginning of my long adventure in shrimp farming. Now we have 42 hectares of ponds and we’re producing between 450 and 500 metric tons per crop with two crops a year.

Carlos Urías: In 1999, I bought a sixty-acre farm in Sinaloa when shrimp prices were very good. Until Mr. Whitespot hit in 2004, I increased production and acreage every year.

Sergio Escutia (interpreting Carlos): In the 1980s and the 1990s, some ejidos and cooperativas on communal land went into shrimp farming. Most of them are out of business now, or have become private sector shrimp farms. Some rent their land to private-sector shrimp farms, and some of them have partnerships with the private sector. They are no longer major players in Mexican shrimp farming. In Sinaloa, I think the private sector is responsible for more than 90% of production now.

Sergio Escutia: We have some intensive farms, some extensive farms, but most of the farms are semi-intensive. The average stocking rate in Sinaloa is eight postlarvae per square meter. Only three farms are intensive.

Farmed Shrimp Production in Sinaloa 2003 to 2007
	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007
Production in Metric Tons	24,850	18,082	25,159	34,239	33,541
Hectares of Ponds	28,668	30,449	33,981	37,653	40,866
Postlarvae Production in Millions	2,956	3,289	2,914	3,482	3,630
Stocking Density per Hectare	10.3	10.8	8.6	9.2	8.9

Sergio Escutia: The first partial harvest is done when the shrimp reach around 10 grams. We do two to three more harvests with the final one yielding up to 40-gram shrimp. Usually the last harvest produces 30 to 35-gram shrimp. This is also done at a lower density by other farms in Sinaloa.

Carlos Urías: Half the farmers stock in March and harvest in late June or early July. Then they restock and harvest again in September and October. The other half stock in May and harvest in September and October.

Sergio Escutia: Each sector of the state of Sinaloa has an aquatic health officer. He’s a technician at the service of the shrimp farmers in his area, but sometimes he is also a policeman. He patrols just one area of the state. He knows what is going on there. Nothing escapes his scrutiny. If he sees seagulls predating on a farm, an indication that shrimp may be stressed, he checks out that farm and appropriate measures are taken.

Shrimp News: Do they check the hatcheries, broodstock and postlarvae for diseases?

Carlos Urías: We started by focusing on the postlarvae. We still check the larvae, but now we are concentrating on the broodstock, making sure they are clean. If you have clean broodstock, you can produce clean postlarvae. At the beginning of October, we check all the broodstock at all of the hatcheries. Technicians check the broodstock in groups of six. It would be prohibitively expensive to check every animal. They draw hemolymph from six animals, mix it together and run a PCR test on the mix. In a way, every animal is checked. If any of those tests are positive for viruses, the batch of broodstock that they came from is destroyed. They check for whitespot, Taura, yellowhead and IHHN. Consequently, viral diseases on farms have dropped dramatically.

Shrimp News: What do you think about all the farmed shrimp that is coming into Mexico from Belize, Nicaragua and Guatemala?

Sergio Escutia: We are not very worried about the amount of shrimp that comes into Mexico from Central America, but we are very worried about those shrimp bringing diseases into Mexico, particularly viral diseases that we don’t have, or different strains of a virus that we already have. We are not against free trade, but we want to protect our shrimp. In cattle and poultry, the catalogue of diseases is somewhat complete, but we don’t think that’s the case with shrimp. There are probably shrimp diseases out there that have not been discovered, and we don’t want to import them. The shrimp from Central America is sometimes imported into Mexico fresh on ice. Fresh shrimp probably present a greater risk than frozen shrimp. We know that the risk from frozen shrimp is lower, but we are worried particularly about the imported head-on product because that shrimp is sometimes reprocessed a few kilometers away from Mexican shrimp farms. Sometimes the processing wastes from those shrimp—the heads and shells—are thrown into municipal dumps, and from there birds can easily carry it to shrimp farms. Some of the wastes are even thrown fresh into the estuaries. We’re particularly worried about this risk.

Shrimp News: If the shrimp farms in southern Sinaloa stocked their ponds earlier, would they be able to displace some of the imports that are coming into Mexico from Central America?

Sergio Escutia: Stocking earlier means stocking in colder water, which can cause a disease outbreak. Shrimp farmers in Mexico can no longer stock their ponds whenever they wish. They are subject to federal and some state laws that are enforced with the help of the Aquatic Health Committees. We don’t want farms stocking during unsuitable conditions. Sinaloa is a long state. We have farms in the tropics and farms in the semitropics and the stocking dates are set accordingly. Controlling the stocking period has brought a lot of stability to the industry. We no longer have great ups and downs in production. We would rather face controlled imports from our southern neighbors with appropriate rules developed under a well done risk assessment than the disease problems that bad stocking management would bring.

Carlos Urías: The national market for shrimp is already consuming 150,000 metric tons of shrimp a year, so we sell most of our shrimp on the national market, probably 80%. The rest goes to the United States. Very little goes to Europe.

Sergio Escutia: Most of the shrimp that the Mexican farmer produces is consumed domestically. There’s a very strong and steadily growing market for fresh head-on shrimp in Mexico. That is why some of the shrimp consumed in Mexico comes from Central American farms.

Shrimp News: Sergio, you’re on the steering meeting for WWF’s shrimp dialogue. How did the first meeting go?

Sergio Escutia: It was better than the morning session, when things got a little tense. We got to know each other better during the first steering committee meeting. It was friendly and productive. We talked about ways of working together. I think once we start communication with each other, the work will flow quite nicely. We cannot be too specific on the goals. Shrimp farming employs multiple technologies. The American way is different from the Asian way. We should not exclude practices that don’t harm the environment. The steering committee is well balanced, including representatives from NGOs, academia and the shrimp farming industry. We’ll be able to work out our differences and develop standards that we all believe in. I am very optimistic about the shrimp dialogue. We talked mostly about the way we were going to communicate, which will be mostly by email. We did not make any major decisions about standards during the first meeting. We did discuss the importance of inviting other countries, like Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador, onto the steering committee and into the shrimp dialogue. We should include shrimp farmers from South America and not only from Central America and Mexico. There are exceptions of course, but most of the shrimp farms in the western hemisphere are somewhat similar. WWF’s Eric Bernard will coordinate everything, and the steering committee should be up and running in two weeks. I felt very positive about the first meeting of the steering committee. It might take longer than expected to work things out, but we will get there. We have many things to consider. Shrimp farmers understand that we must protect the environment but the devil is in the details. We must be very careful with the wording otherwise we could punish some farmers that are not harming the environment just because they are doing things in a different way.

Shrimp News: Are there environmental groups in Mexico that are critical of shrimp farming?

Carlos Urías: Yes, but in general terms we get along. Sometimes they point out some particular problems but most of them understand that we are attempting to do shrimp farming the way it should be done.

Sergio Escutia: We have to take into account that Mexican shrimp farming got started relatively late compared to Central and South America. We were able to learn from past mistakes. Most of the environmentalists in Mexico know that shrimp farming has taken a considerable amount of fishing effort off the ocean. Thousands of people are now making a living from shrimp farming in Mexico. Where would these people be if they were not working on shrimp farms? All the good land is already taken for agriculture and the sea can not take any more fishing pressure. Displaced shrimp farm workers that go east into the mountains will most probably end up illegally cutting wood and hunting wildlife or growing narcotics. To the west the most common available jobs are fishing illegally or even worse, transporting drugs north on small boats. The cities to the south are already over populated, and I am sure that Americans do not want more jobless Mexicans crossing the border.

In Mexico, for the most part, shrimp farmers are using land that cannot be used for other types of agriculture. We of course don’t want to convert all the available land into shrimp farms. We don’t want to build farms in areas that have already reached the carrying capacity for shrimp farming. It is very clear to us that we must impose reasonable limits to the development of shrimp farming. We learned from Asia and South America. We want to do it right and be sustainable.

Shrimp News: Last question, I participated in a shrimp farming short course at Texas A&M University in September 2006, and there was an American there that planned to close off an entire lagoon in the state of Jalisco and manage it as a shrimp farm. Basically, he planned to stock the lagoon with PLs or juveniles and harvest them with shrimp trawlers, just the way shrimp fishermen harvest them at sea. Do you know if that project ever went anywhere?

Sergio Escutia: I never heard of that project, but we’re definitely against that type of shrimp farming. You would need to eradicate the predator and competitive fish to be able to grow shrimp there successfully. It’s not right to close off a natural lagoon so that you can farm shrimp. Those lagoons are frequently part of important ecosystems and they are also important for the local fishermen. We do not approve of that concept, and I don’t think it will work anyway. The government is also currently taking action against some smaller projects that dared to do that. As organized shrimp farmers, we have taken legal action in the past against that type of destructive projects, and will do it again if necessary.

Information: Sergio Escutia, Presidente, Confederación de Organizaciones Acuícolas de Estado de Sinaloa, Calzada Aeropuerto 7569, Altos Local B, Colonia Bachigualato, C.P. 82140 Culiacán, Sinaloa, México (phone 669-985-12-28, fax 669-981-33-48, email sergio.escutia@aquastrat.com).

Information: Carlos Urías Espinosa, Presidente del Consejo Directivo, del Comité Estatal de Sanidad Acuícola de Sinaloa, Calzada Aeropuerto #7569, Altos Colonia Bachigualato, Culiacán, Sinaloa, México (phone 667-760-90-25, fax 667-760-34-66, email uecarlos@gmail.com).

Source: Sergio Escutia and Carlos Urías. Interview by Bob Rosenberry, Shrimp News International. Belize City, Belize. April 3, 2008.