Tsunami, mangroves and the market economy.

• Author: Sharma, Devinder
• Position: Economics Reconsidered

The tsunami disaster was the outcome of an insane economic system, led by the World Bank and IMF, that believes in usurping environment, nature and human lives for the sake of unsustainable economic growth for a few.

Since the 1960s, the Asian seacoast region has been plundered by the large industrialized shrimp firms that brought environmentally unfriendly aquaculture to its shores. Shrimp cultivation, rising to over 8 billion tons a year in 2000, had already played havoc with the fragile ecosystems. The "rape and run" industry, as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) once termed it, was largely funded by the World Bank. Nearly 72% of the shrimp farming is confined to Asia.

The expansion of shrimp farming was at the cost of tropical mangroves--among the world's most important ecosystems. Each acre of mangrove forest destroyed results in an estimated 676 pounds' loss in marine harvest. Mangrove swamps have been nature's protection for the coastal regions from the large waves, weathering the impact of cyclones and serving as a nursery for three-fourths of the commercial fish species that spend part of their life cycle in the mangrove swamps. Mangroves in any case were one of the world's most threatened habitats but instead of replanting the mangrove swamps, faulty economic policies only hastened their disappearance. Despite warning by ecologists and environmentalists, the World Bank turned a deaf ear.

Shrimp farming continued its destructive spree, eating away more than half of the world's mangroves. Since the 1960s, for instance, aquaculture in Thailand resulted in a loss of over 65,000 hectares of mangroves. In Indonesia, Java lost 70% of its mangroves, Sulawesi 49% and Sumatra 36%. At the time the tsunami struck in all its fury, logging companies were busy axing mangroves in the Aceh province of Indonesia for exports to Malaysia and Singapore.

In India, mangrove cover has been reduced to less than a third of its original size in the past three decades. Between 1963 and 1977, the period when aquaculture took root, India destroyed nearly 50% of its mangroves. In Andhra Pradesh, more than 50,000 people were forcibly removed and millions displaced to make room for the aquaculture farms. Whatever remained of the mangroves was cut down by the hotel industry. Aided and abetted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests and the Ministry of Industries, builders moved in to ravage the coastline.

Five-star hotels, golf...