Super Shrimp

Farms for protein and profit

Shrimp boats is a-comin',

Their sails are in sight.

Shrimp boats is a-comin',

There's dancin' tonight.

--From a 1950s song

There is shrimp-inspired dancing in Ecuador these days all right, but it is not to the tune of returning boats. Instead, in vast ponds on the salty flatlands of El Oro and other coastal provinces, a new industry has sprung up: shrimp farming. Last year these farms produced 20.8 million lbs. of the tasty crustaceans, vs. nothing just a decade ago, earning $66 million in foreign exchange and hefty profits for Ecuador's new shrimp farmers.

Chief among the new shrimpers is Peter Shayne, 46, a Los Angeles native. Shayne set up a sea urchin processing plant in Chile in 1968, but was expelled by the government of Marxist President Salvador Allende in 1970 as an unwelcome American businessman. Shayne eventually wound up in Ecuador with $20,000 in his pocket and decided to go into the shrimp-packing business; in 1974 he started his first shrimp farm. Now a millionaire, Shayne is one of dozens of wealthy shrimp farmers in Ecuador.

The country's equatorial climate along the coast is ideally suited to the new industry. In an operation resembling the Central London Hatchery in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, adult shrimp are fished from the sea and placed in large tanks where subtle and carefully controlled variations in light and water temperature induce breeding. Pregnant females--each producing 150,000 to 200,000 eggs--are transferred by hand to separate hatching tanks, where an average of 90,000 eggs survive to become adolescent shrimp. After 17 days, always just around dawn to avoid damage by sunlight, the young shrimp are transferred to maturation ponds. There, with technicians and the anxious farmers standing by, they grow to adults.

Shayne's ponds are dug on the coastal flatlands, shored by timbering and fed by a canal. The square pools produce 800 lbs. per acre at each harvest, and he gets three harvests a year, a far higher yield than most of his fellow shrimp farmers, who average fewer than two harvests of approximately 300 to 400 lbs. each. In a laboratory up the coast from Shayne's ponds, experts work on secret methods for getting shrimp to produce more eggs; in another plant machines compact food similar to cattle feed so that it stays in one piece under water. Shrimp, it seems, like their food intact.

Shayne is already the world's biggest single exporter of farmed shrimp, although competitors are growing rapidly. Fish farming, practiced by the Chinese some 4,000 years ago, is producing shrimp in commercial quantities in countries like Japan and the Philippines. It is going on also in states such as Hawaii, California and Florida, and there is even a research facility in landlocked Arizona. Says Shayne: "If you do it right, this is the best business going. The returns are even better than from growing marijuana."

The profits are indeed substantial and have created a kind of gold-rush atmosphere in Ecuador. An investment of $1,200 to $2,000 per acre of shrimp pond could be returned in just six months. Says Joe Fischer, an aquaculture expert brought in from Hawaii by Shayne: "People are racing to get ponds dug, even when they have no idea what they are doing."

There can still be hazards. Ecuadorian exports last year were up 62% in volume since 1979, but they increased by only 27% in value because the price of shrimp dropped an average of 80-c- per lb. Main reason: buyers were turned off by high prices and knocked shrimp off their shopping lists. American shrimpers, who still practice their trade in boats, do not like the lower prices and tough competition. They have been making protectionist rumbles in Washington for a tariff on imported shrimp, but thus far to no avail.

Shayne and the other shrimp producers see their product as a source of cheap, high-quality protein. Says Scott Horton, a marine biologist from Texas A&M: "Shrimp has far greater food value than any other farm product, even beef. It is really the chicken of the sea." Lower prices will be good news for consumers; in some Manhattan restaurants last week six shrimp cost a stunning $8.

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