A 300-acre shrimp farm is being proposed for state-owned land on the Mana Plain, on the western coast of Kaua`i, by CEATECH USA, Inc., a company made up of local aquaculturists and mainland corporations. The company is in the initial stages of acquiring the several state and federal permits needed to construct the facility.
CEATECH (short for Controlled Environment Aquaculture Technology) plans call for building 104 separate one-acre ponds. These ponds, together, are expected to produce a total of 4 million pounds of shrimp a year, 80 percent of which are intended for the export market.
CEATECH says its shrimp farm will create 100 to 160 full-or part-time jobs in the Kekaha area.
Tarnishing the glow of this new venture is the heavy weight of baggage carried by shrimp farm ventures globally. Environmentally, the industry has been held responsible for spreading diseases to wild animals, polluting land and water, depleting wild fish populations, and destroying ecologically valuable environments.
In addition, the shrimp farm industry in Hawai`i has been plagued with failure. Maku`u Aquafarm, `Ohi`a Shrimp Farm Corp., Pacific Sea Farms, Aurea Marine, Inc., and Amorient Aquafarm are all local shrimp farms that have bailed out of the business in the last decade, some after many years of operation. Those that remain are generally restricted to local high-end or ethnic markets.
According to a local seafood marketer who has dealt with some of Hawai`i’s failed companies, shrimp farming “doesn’t have a meaningful place in Hawai`i,” where the climate is too cold, the cost of utilities too high, and water not as readily available as it is in such places as Thailand and Bangladesh.
But Paul Bienfang, CEATECH’s senior vice president for environmental compliance and technology, swears his company’s operations will be “vitally different” from the others.
Bienfang’s background includes a stint at the Oceanic Institute, where he was vice president, senior scientist, and co-chief executive officer. The institute is a marine research organization with its offices at Waimanalo.
Bienfang is one of nine CEATECH personnel to come from the Oceanic Institute, which has undertaken research in marine shrimp-farming technology and has organized the federally financed effort to develop a U.S. shrimp-farm industry.
A Decade of Research
According to a 1994 report of the U.S. Marine Shrimp Farming Program, the U.S. catch of wild shrimp peaked in 1983. At the time, the shrimp-farm industry was “minuscule, moribund, and faced with formidable problems,” the report goes on to say.
Nonetheless, shrimp remains one of the most popular seafoods in the United States. Purchase of shrimp from foreign nations contributed more than $2 billion to the U.S. trade deficit in 1994, the report says.
In the early 1980s, the Oceanic Institute joined with the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory in Mississippi and Tufts University in a consortium, called the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory Consortium, to develop technologies, products, and services to support a domestic shrimp-farm industry. The publicly financed program, which eventually became known as the U.S. Marine Shrimp Farming Program, had at its objective the creation of a U.S. industry that would compete in world markets.
The first congressional appropriation to the program was made in 1984. Since then, more than $35 million in federal funds has been channeled to the program by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Among other things, the program has attempted to develop “seed stock;” has addressed the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease; and has tried to come up with environmentally sound, cost-effective shrimp-growing techniques.
In 1988, the state Legislature appropriated $250,000 for a demonstration shrimp facility to be developed by the Shrimp Farming Program. The appropriation was intended to look into whether it would be possible to convert sugar plantation infrastructure to support an industry that had “somewhat more of a future,” as Bienfang puts it. The prototype was to be built on Waialua Sugar Co. lands on O`ahu. However, the project stalled out and the funds eventually lapsed.
The idea of converting plantation infrastructure to support of a shrimp farm had caught the imagination of Landis Ignacio, a resident of the west side of Kaua`i who worked for Kekaha Sugar Co., as its irrigation supervisor (1979 to 1982) and manager of agricultural operations for the company’s successor, Amfac Sugar Kaua`i. In addition, Ignacio was general manager and a partner of Waimea Aquatics, an aquaculture farm.
Ignacio founded Sunkiss Shrimp Co., Ltd., in 1991. The next year, he applied for land from the state and eventually received a 35-year lease on five acres at Kekaha. By 1993, construction had begun to carve four quarter-acre shrimp cultivation ponds on the parcel.
In 1995, Robert Kanna, a native of west Kaua`i, joined Sunkiss. Like Bienfang, Kanna also came from the ranks of OI, having been a research assistant and supervisor of intensive shrimp aquaculture technology from 1984 to 1995.
According to Bienfang, the Sunkiss farm demonstrated the usefulness of the technologies OI had developed in its research. It proved, he says, that you could grow shrimp, given the right climate and environment, ample sunshine, and appropriate neighbors. In addition, he says, the project produced an “extremely high-quality shrimp.”
Stepping Up
In late 1996, a mainland-based company sought to commercialize the new shrimp-farming technology and formed CEATECH USA, Inc. Among its subsidiaries are CEATECH HHGI Breeding Corp., CEATECH Plantations, Inc., Hawai`i High Health Seafood Corp., and Sunkiss Shrimp Co., Ltd., which was purchased by CEATECH in early 1997. Investors include Unity House, a non-profit organization providing benefits to unionized hotel and restaurant employees and members of two Teamster locals. According a letter from Unity House president Anthony Rutledge that is appended to CEATECH’s final environmental assessment, the organization has purchased a $500,000 stake in the corporation.
In 1997, the state Board of Land and Natural Resources granted CEATECH a right of entry to the state lands that it plans to lease, allowing the company to conduct planning and field studies that were used in the preparation of an environmental assessment.
On April 9, 1998, following acceptance of the final environmental assessment, the Land Board granted CEATECH a revocable permit and right of entry to begin construction of the facility.
Environmental Blemishes
When CEATECH completes its facility, the number of shrimp ponds in Kekaha will have increased by a factor of 26. With the exponential increase in the farm’s size, any environmental impacts of the project may be expected to grow as well.
Bienfang acknowledges this: “Frankly, aquafarming in general, and shrimp farming in particular, has some environmental blemishes. In a lot of foreign locales, the attitude toward aquaculture was sort of ‘rape and run.’ Somebody would take an environment, do whatever they had to do to get it into production quickly, harvest whatever they could at low cost, and make money until the area became unfit.
Among the areas targeted, he notes, were those that could easily be converted to ponds — mangrove stands, wetlands, and other coastal areas. The areas would be fouled when careless farmers would discharge their effluent into lagoons and embayments with restricted circulation.
Bikasham Gujja and Andrea Finger-Stich, in the September 1996 issue of the magazine Environment, describe ways in which effluent from shrimp aquaculture contributes to eutrophication (too many nutrients) and red tide. “Eutrophication occurs when excessive amounts of plant nutrients, usually nitrates or phosphates, are added to a body of water. Aquatic plant life proliferates in this rich growth medium, choking out other species. Red tides are an unusual condition associated with a bloom of dinoflagellates in marine waters, which gives the water a red, yellow, or brown tint. This excessive growth kills marine biota…. All the shrimp-producing countries have been affected by these phenomena, which have spread disease lethal to shrimp.”
Effluent is often laden with dead algae, shrimp shells, drugs, antibiotics, and uneaten shrimp food. According to a March-June 1995 article on prawns in The Ecologist, “Some intensive farms use up to 35 chemical and biological products as disinfectants, soil and water conditioners, pesticides, fertilizers, and feed additives.”
Yet another outcome of shrimp farming is wasted land. According to Gujja and Finger-Stich, between 1985 and 1995, approximately 150,000 hectares of ponds were abandoned worldwide.
“If production rates remain constant,” they continue,” another 100,000 hectares will be abandoned by the year 2000…This land, mostly mangrove swamps, will be totally unproductive. Meaningful regeneration might take 20 to 30 years.”
Meanwhile, in Hawai`i
The marine shrimp culture industry here began with a Japanese firm, IKKO, which in 1979 leased five hectares of ponds in Kahuku and established a seed facility at the Oceanic Institute. The company’s goal was to use Japanese techniques to produce Penaeus japonicus, the Kuruma prawn, for live shipment to Tokyo. IKKO ended its farming efforts in 1983 because its yields were not high enough to make the effort economically worthwhile.
Also in the early 1980s, Marine Culture Enterprises, a cooperative effort of the Coca-Cola Company and the University of Arizona’s Environmental Research Lab, moved to Hawai`i from Mexico. The farm used a “super-intensive” farming technology that included air-supported greenhouses, shallow raceways, high-quality feeds, and water exchange rates as high as 500 percent a day. Marine Culture Enterprises was later sold to W.R. Grace and Co., which in 1984 opened its first production unit, consisting of one hectare of raceways. The farm’s lofty goals of producing 1,500 to 2,000 tons of shrimp annually were dashed in 1987, when an outbreak of IHHN virus hit the farm and destroyed a million-dollar crop of P. stylirostris. W.R. Grace and Co., then decided to sell the business to a Norwegian firm, which renamed the company Pacific Sea Farms.
But four years later, Pacific Sea Farms was itself in trouble. In May 1991, four Norwegian companies sought to place Pacific Sea Farms into involuntary bankruptcy, claiming the shrimp company owned them $2.4 million. Newspaper reports at the time say that the shrimp company also owed landlord Campbell Estate $100,000 in back rent.
That same year, Hawai`i’s then-largest shrimp farm, Amorient, was hit with a growth-stunting virus, forcing the company to restock its ponds with virus-free shrimp. A short time later, in March 1991, the farm was flooded, resulting in $400,000 worth of damage and lost production.
A year later, Amorient’s vice president and general manager, Linden Burzell, complained in an article published in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that some Hawai`i shrimp merchants were importing frozen South American shrimp and passing it off as fresh Kahuku shrimp. Burzell was quoted as saying, “We’re probably within one more flood, one more regulation or another season without relief of the unfair competition issue from throwing in the towel.”
Two years later, Amorient shut down its Kahuku farm and road stand, citing a slump in tourism, competition from cheaper, foreign-raised shrimp, increased costs of production (including higher property taxes and insurance rates), and aging facilities. Last but not least, the shrimp were being preyed on by night herons from the nearby wildlife refuge, the company’s new general manager, Nick Carpenter, told the Star-Bulletin reporter.
In September 1986, Craig Emberson and Matthew Lyum of the now-defunct Orca Sea Farms of Moloka`i described how at least part of the industry regarded Hawai`i’s potential role in the shrimp market: “It is clearly uneconomical to rear shrimp in Hawai`i to compete with frozen imports from Mexico or Ecuador.” Those views would seem to be borne out by the industry’s experience since then.
Recipe for Success
But Bienfang is not discouraged. Some earlier efforts failed because the operators were trying to run a third-world production system in an expensive business climate, he says. “They were essentially trying to take that same big rectangular pond system and they were trying to make it work here,” he says.
Even as one after another shrimp farm in Hawai`i closed, Bienfang and his OI colleagues refused to give up their hope of an economically viable shrimp-farming industry in the state. “When we looked at this back in the mid-1980s, with the goal of developing a technology that was appropriate for the United States, we simply had to get more dollars per acre per year out of the farm than what farmers in Ecuador, Malaysia, Indonesia, or India had to do,” he says.
To do this, it would be necessary to increase farm yields. In poorer countries, operators simply expand their ponds to increase yields. In Hawai`i and the rest of the United States, the goal was instead to increase the yields from ponds through increasing the animals’ growth and survival rates.
The Oceanic Institute tried to get local shrimp farmers to adopt the technology it developed, especially with respect to the use of disease-free seed stock. But, Bienfang notes, the industry did not take off — and for this, he places much of the blame on the shrimp farmers themselves.
“I’ll put it in culinary terms,” he says. Shrimp farmers “would take a recipe that maybe had 17 steps, and they’d decide, ‘Well, we don’t know why we have to do step five, and step seven seems expensive, I don’t want to do that, and those last three I can’t figure… We’ll just do steps one, three, five, and seven.’ Something would then go wrong and they’d say, ‘Well, that doesn’t solve anything.'”
What the Oceanic Institute offered, he says, wasn’t “silver bullets — it’s a technology package.”
Included on CEATECH’s staff and board of advisors are researchers who have participated in the development of that very “technology package.” James Sweeny, CEATECH vice president and director of its shrimp program, was manager of the Oceanic Institute’s shrimp program starting in 1983 and a member of the U.S. Marine Shrimp Farming Program’s technical committee. CEATECH’s advisory board members include Donald Lighter, a University of Arizona veterinary science professor and principal investigator for disease research in the Gulf Coast Marine Shrimp Farming Consortium; James Wyban, a former principal investigator for shrimp research at Oceanic Institute; Michael Hamnett, director of the University of Hawai`i’s Social Science Research Institute; and Harold Rosenthal, former president of the European Mariculture Society and chairman of the International Council for Exploration of the Seas’ working group on environmental interactions with mariculture.
In contrast to the operations of shrimp farmers in Asia, Bienfang says, the very first thing CEATECH did when it incorporated was to devise a “corporate strategy for environmental compatibility.” This, he says, is consistent with Article 9 of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization’s Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, and it also conforms with various academic and industrial recommendations for best-management practices.
(Article 9 of the FAO’s Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries calls for the “responsible development of aquaculture” in a manner that, among other things, protects genetic diversity and ecosystem integrity, is ecologically sustainable, does not interfere with the access of local communities to fishing grounds, uses “appropriate feeds,” minimizes reliance on drugs, hormones, vaccines, and other disease controls, and restricts use of “chemical inputs.” The FAO adopted the code in 1995; the U.S. Congress agreed to implement the code in 1996, when it passed the Sustainable Fisheries Act amending the nation’s fundamental laws on fishery management, the Magnson-Stevens Fishery Management Conservation Act. Rules to implement the Sustainable Fisheries Act were adopted in 1997.)
Key Ingredients
So what are the ingredients in CEATECH’s “recipe” for success?
Scaling back the size of ponds is one element. Elsewhere, ponds have been developed that are on the scale of hectares (a hectare is roughly 2.5 acres). Large ponds allow for greater yields and lower costs, but they are also difficult to control. The larger the ponds, the more difficult it is to calculate survival rates. “So how do you know whether you should feed three buckets or four buckets or six buckets?” Bienfang asks. “How many shrimp are surviving? You have no idea” in a large pond. As a result, large ponds typically lead to waste, to over-feeding, and inefficiencies, he says.
Ponds too big to manage properly can also lead to reduced quality of shrimp and, in some cases, die-off of all the animals in the pond. Too much feed, water-borne nutrients, compounded with decaying organic matter can result in a situation where oxygen levels in the water diminish to the point where the pond can no longer support life, Bienfang says. The inevitable result: a pond full of dead shrimp.
Another element in CEATECH’s recipe is the use of round ponds, as opposed to long, rectangular ponds. Oceanic Institute engineered the one-acre round ponds to allow better control of water quality, Bienfang says. In these ponds, material falls to the bottom of the pond while paddle wheels create a circular current. Bacterial and algal flocks, molts, and feces are carried to the pond’s center, where they are more easily removed from the pond. With the regular removal of such wastes, oxygen levels in the water don’t deteriorate, Bienfang says.
Using such methods, CEATECH is able to get 85 percent survival rates among its shrimp, Bienfang says. Elsewhere, more typical rates are around 30 to 35 percent.
Fish Meals
One concern that many environmentalists have about aquaculture operation in general has been the degree to which aquaculture relies on and even promotes a system of ocean fishing that is inherently wasteful. The fish meal that is used in shrimp pellets is a byproduct of ocean fishing. Unwanted species of fish that are caught in huge trawl nets are often turned into fish meal in the holds of the factory ships that caught them.
This is further explained in the Environment article by Gujja and Finger-Stich, who note that typically, shrimp eat about three times their harvested weight, converting about 17 percent of their feed into edible flesh. In 1996, between a quarter and half of the content of food pellets for shrimp came from fish caught in the open ocean, Gujja and Finger Stich write: “As wild fish stocks continue to be depleted, the threat of food scarcity increases. Culturing carnivorous species like shrimp actually contributes to the depletion” of ocean stocks.
But, says Bienfang, CEATECH uses feed that contains soybean and other grains with a “minimum of fish meal” (5 percent squid meal, he specified). In addition, he says, CEATECH’s feed conversion ratios are improved because there is less food wasted. “We’re increasing the efficiency of the food supplied,” he says. “It goes to the animals, not into the water or the soil.”
The CEATECH operation will be adjacent to the Kawaiele wildlife refuge that the state has worked for years to establish. When asked if birds from the refuge could prey on shrimp in the ponds, Bienfang said that was not a concern. The steep slopes and plastic lining of the ponds would keep shorebirds from foraging in the ponds, as they did in Kahuku, he said. Besides that, he said, the birds find the network of drainage channels in the Mana area a plentiful, more hospitable source of food.
Disease Control
Another environmental issue surrounding aquaculture has been the operators’ heavy reliance on drugs, hormones, and other chemicals that can often end up as pollutants in ocean environments. Diseases can destroy aquaculture farms. Particularly troublesome are viruses, such as Infectious Hypodermal and Hematopoietic Necrosis Virus (IHHNV) and Taura Syndrome Virus (TSV), which have both made their way to Hawai`i (IHHNV in the 1980s, TSV in 1995). IHHNV can cause runt deformity and TSV gives shrimp red tails, black spots, or both. Either virus can result in death.
To minimize the risk of a virus running through their animals, farms have begun to use shrimp from hatcheries that are virus-free. These are called Specific Pathogen Free (SPF) shrimp. The state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Aquaculture Development Program reports that all shrimp farms in Hawai`i grow SPF shrimp.
Besides using pathogen-free shrimp, CEATECH has taken several other measures to prevent disease at its facilities. Its hatchery is enclosed. Vehicles must pass through a disinfection reservoir on entry to the facility. Anyone entering the hatchery has to change their footwear and disinfect their hands with alcohol. All incoming water is filtered and sterilized by ultraviolet radiation. Effluent water is also UV-sterilized before being transferred to a settling pond.
All these measure, and more, Bienfang says, mean that CEATECH will not be using drugs in its operations. Indeed, he told Environment Hawai`i, there would never come a time when CEATECH would violate its no-drug, no-hormone policy.
Waste Management
John Bardach, adjunct professor of geography and oceanography at the University of Hawai`i, wrote in the March 1988 issue of Environment that shrimp and prawn farms in Hawai`i voided quantities of organic matter “equivalent to the sewage of a few thousand people into runoff waters and canals that lead into the sea.” This, he continued, “could affect the clean bays and beaches that are greatly valued by Hawaiians for aesthetic reasons and tourism promotion.
If the industry were to increase 10- to 20- fold as the state desires, he writes, “shrimp farms and the like could have an effluent load equivalent to the sewage of about 350,000 people within a total permanent resident and pro-rated tourist population of 1.7 to 2 million.”
Bienfang claims CEATECH’s operations in this regard will not be a problem: “Our discharge is fundamentally different. If we look at old pond systems, water came in, water came out, and when you harvested, everything that was on the bottom of the pond went out. When there was a flood, everything that was on the bottom went out. When you had to drain the pond, for whatever reason, everything on the bottom went out.” But in CEATECH’s operation, he says, detritus collects at the pond’s center and is sent to a waste management system elsewhere at the facility. “Basically,” he says, “we intend to capture a lot more of our waste before it goes out and we are able to avoid the large-scale pulses of discharged material that have occurred in other ponds.”
CEATECH has applied for a NPDES permit from the Department of Health. According to a consultant’s report contained in the environmental assessment, some 55 million gallons a day of wastewater will be discharged from CEATECH ponds into the relatively turbulent ocean waters off the Kaua`i coast. The receiving waters out to 6,000 feet are now used as a zone of mixing for about 45 mgd of agricultural runoff from Kekaha Sugar cane fields, which is collected in the Kawaiele drainage channel. According to the report made by Edward K. Noda and Associates, water quality at the outer boundary of the zone of mixing will meet most water quality standards for Class A waters. “Caveats” mentioned by the Noda report state that for total phosphorous, chlorophyll a, and turbidity, geometric-mean water quality standards may be minimally exceeded.
Still, the report concludes, “considering the relatively high energy wave environment, and the tidal current-dominated nearshore current regime, it is reasonable to expect good dilutions of discharges and good flushing of the nearshore coastal waters. Therefore, it is recommended that the existing ZOM [zone of mixing] boundary of 6,000 foot radial distance from the Kawaiele outlet also be applied to CEATECH’s proposed discharge.”
— Teresa Dawson
Volume 8, Number 12 June 1998
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