Nagapattinam
When lands go barren, the farmers have another problem created by their fellow men who own shrimp farms and drain the waste water into the adjacent agricultural lands that turn the fertile land into saline one.
Nagapattinam, being a front runner district of the state for highest exports of marine commodities through the vast number of shrimp farms, the coastal farmers of Vedaranyam allege that the greed of shrimp farms has been causing the mass migration of farm hands out of the coastal villages.
Around 25 per cent of the agriculture labourers, involving about 200 families, have already migrated to textile and construction firms in adjacent districts like Thanjavur, Tiruchy and Karur.
According to official sources, as many as 1,400 shrimp farms are active across Nagapattinam district, of which only 900-odd farms are functioning with appropriate licences while the rest are either awaiting licences from the District Level Committee (DLC) or have skipped the process of licence application with political clout.
Though shrimp farming is a lucrative business in Nagapattinam fetching forex of around Rs 400 crore annually, the farmers and farm labourers in Vettaikaraniruppu and Thalainayar regions charge that as much as 500 acres of cultivable lands have been turned into futile lands in the past decade. This has turned the lands into saline, the farmers said.
“Saline water is the main source for shrimp farming and so they use to drain the water into adjacent agricultural land. We staged a series of demonstration in Tirukuvalai region last month and so the officials intervened and stopped the draining into cultivable land. But it is widely drained in Thalainayar which is a coastal belt and huge acreage of lands has been turned into shrimp farming as the agricultural lands have gone barren due to draining of saline water,” P R Pandian, president of All farmers Coordination Committee, told DTNext.
He also said that the farmers will meet the revenue officials and putforth the demand not to drain saline into agricultural land so that the fertility of the land will be maintained. As per the instructions of Coastal Aquaculture Authority (CAA), a statutory body for regulating the aqua farming practices, it is said that all the L. vannamei shrimp farms should have Effluent Treatment System (ETS) to treat the saline water used in farms before discharging it into nearby habitat.
But farmers charged that the District Level Committee (DLC) responsible for monitoring the shrimp farms have not implemented ETS in the most of the shrimp farms in Vettaikaraniruppu locality.
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