he once ubiquitous figure of the toiling woman on farmlands has long faded. Today, a landscape once dotted by direct-sown fields that summoned the woman worker has been altered by shrimp farms that have made inroads from the creeks to inlands, on farmlands from Velankanni to Thiruthuraipoondi here.
Against this proliferation of shrimp farms on farm lands, the loss of women workers and the impact of shrimp farms has been ignored.
Two decades after shrimp industry made entry with claims of local employment, its actual employment pattern was as follows. Irrespective of the size of the pond (.5 ha to 1 ha), each seed-stocked pond is manned by one person.
A big farm, spread over tens of hectares, may have maximum of eight ponds, employing not more than 10 persons for 120 days of crop period.
This land-labour ratio was grossly disproportionate to the vast hectares of cultivable land acquired by shrimp farms.
In the absence of sex-disaggregated data on women’s labour in shrimp farms, field study by The Hindu reveal zero employment of women at the production level here.
Women are used for pond clearance after harvest. The cyclical feeding of shrimp requires resident labourers and women were not suitable for that task, says Swarnalatha, a prawn farm owner.
This displacement of women workers and the social costs borne by them are ignored.
Shrimp farms have snatched the wage earning capacity of farm women, who are drivers of household economy.
“The money earned by the men in shrimp farms barely reaches their home, and gets used up in TASMAC shops,” says Senbagavalli.
It’s a dual battle for women; their labour displacement aside, women bear the social costs arising out of loss of common property resources from discharge of untreated effluents into water bodies and salination of groundwater – and forced to walk long distances for potable water.
The demographics of land ownership, land-use, and social fault lines have changed.
“Today, there is a shrimp farm owning elite and the rest of the displaced labour, and those waiting in the wings to join the shrimp culture,” says Birla Thangadurai, member, district monitoring committee for bonded labour.
A new form of feudal land-relations is at play with new elite of non-resident big farmers, who acquired vast hectares of land in the early 1990s, as government clamoured for foreign exchange reserves through then nascent export-oriented shrimp culture. In an early interaction, a Puducherry-based big shrimp farmer dubbed it as a “win-win situation” – both for farmers who made distress sale and for the non-resident buyers, who swooped in for land along the coasts.
Although, shrimp lobby claims to represent small-marginal local farmers, who took to aquaculture, there is no collective bargaining as the export market favours the big farmer that have the resources to put up a healthy produce.
For the marginal shrimp farmer, who converted his farmlands into shrimp ponds, it’s a lone fight.
One farmer shifting to shrimp culture triggers a cascading effect. “When a farmer two fields away puts up a shrimp farm, I don’t have a choice to cultivate with the saline water in his pond,” says Ramamoorthy of Vettaikaraniruppu. The organic link of women and men working hand in hand in the fields has been snapped.
Today, shrimp farms are exclusive male enclaves. The shrimp that adorns the culinary table of the first world has steadily eroded women’s livelihood and sustenance along the coasts here, akin to the “blood diamonds” of Africa, says an activist.
The money earned by the men in shrimp farms barely reaches their home, and gets used up in TASMAC shops
