FEATURE
A success story
L
Ecuadorian shrimp farming
by Hervé Lucien-Brun, Aquaculture & Qualite, France
ocated between Colombia and Peru on the Pacific cost of the South American continent, Ecuador is a small Latin American country, with only 277,000 square kilometers of land and 2,200 km of coastline. Nevertheless, Ecuador is one of the world’s major players in farmed shrimp production (Fig. 1), especially if we look at the shrimp production ratios relative to the land surface (Fig. 2) or to the length of coastline of the considered countries (Fig. 3). Shrimp farming in Ecuador started in 1969 with the extensive method, which consisted of capturing the seeds from the estuaries and then transporting them into the earth ponds where they were maintained during four to eight months in order to reach a marketable size. The size of the ponds was from 10 to over 50 hectares. Today, almost 185,000 thousand hectares of ponds are dedicated to shrimp production mostly located in the Guayaquil area (look Fig. 4). The individual size of a shrimp farm ranges from less than 10 hectares to more than 2,000, but a large majority (almost 35 percent), in terms of surface are between 100 to 250Ha (Fig. 5). This repartition is different when talking about the number of farms (Tab. 1). The density of shrimp farms in the Guayas is really impressive with a lot of ecological connections between all farms. So it is almost impossible that one shrimp can be isolated from others (Fig. 6). It is also important to insist on the fact that the water quality is variable in a lot of farms according to their position in the delta. During the winter and rainy season, the temperature is elevated but the salinity is very low to almost 0ppt in many farms; during the summer and dry season, the temperature is lower and the salinity higher (from 10ppt to 36ppt according the farm situation). Despite these not being the optimal theoretical condition for sustainable shrimp farming, Ecuador has pioneered and led shrimp farming production in Latin America.
What happened from 1970-2000?
During the late 70s and early 80s, the farming method moved towards semi-intensive techniques such as increasing water
changes through the implementation of pumping stations and feeding shrimp with compound feed produced by local enterprises. During that period, Ecuadorean growers relied almost entirely on post larvae (PL’s), collected in the wild by artisanal fishermen, to stock their ponds. Estimates vary, but apparently more than 90,000 people were involved in this fishery. In 1984, the year following the very strong Niño phenomena, the lack of wild PL’s pushed farm owners to build hatcheries. As a result, throughout the late 80s, more than 65 large hatcheries and a lot of smaller ones were built, mostly along the Peninsula de Santa Helena, which takes the famous name of the hatchery raw. The biologists who built these hatcheries were of various nationalities - Ecuadorian, American, Mexican, English, French and Filipinos. A large majority of these hatcheries were built following the Aquacop design or the Galveston one. In 2014, a total of 110 hatcheries were registered by the Ecuadorian National Institute of Fisheries, which are able to produce a total of more than five billion PL’s per month. Apart from very few foreign-owned companies (between 2-4), Table 1: Number of ecuadorian shrimp farms per size and per provinces Provinces
Guayas & Santa Helenta
Manabi
0-10 Ha
148
203
166
10-20 Ha
107
146
20-30 Ha
118
94
30-40 Ha
79
43
Unit size of farms
El Oro
Esmeralda
Total N ̊
%
88
605
20%
215
82
550
18%
153
38
403
13%
93
29
244
8%
40-50 Ha
112
50
87
17
266
9%
50-100 Ha
229
38
127
21
415
14%
100-250 Ha
330
28
71
14
443
15%
250-500
60
3
6
11
80
3%
500-1,000 Ha
24
-
4
2
30
1%
1,000-2,000 Ha
8
-
-
1
9
0%
UP 2,000 Ha TOTAL
1
-
-
-
1
0%
1 216
605
992
303
3 046
100%
32 | May 2017 - International Aquafeed