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Shrimp ponds and clouded water stretch to the horizon at Bumi Dipasena in Sumatra’s Lampung province, one of the largest shrimp farms in the world. Some 65 square miles were carved out of the island’s coastal mangrove forest in the early 1990s to give new jobs and homes to about nine thousand families relocated from Indonesia’s impoverished and overcrowded cities, part of a government initiative to reduce poverty. It worked for a while. At its peak in the late 1990s Bumi Dipasena produced an average of 200 tons of shrimp a day generating $3 million in export revenue. But pollution, poor management, and shrimp diseases have since taken their toll, and many of the ponds are now fallow. In fact, of the 2,300 square miles of mangroves that Indonesia cleared for shrimp farms over the last three decades—some of the highest rates of deforestation in the world—more than half are now idle or abandoned. Large-scale monocultures like this can be extremely productive and, at the same time, precarious.

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©2016 George Steinmetz
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Shrimp ponds and clouded water stretch to the horizon at Bumi Dipasena in Sumatra’s Lampung province, one of the largest shrimp farms in the world. Some 65 square miles were carved out of the island’s coastal mangrove forest in the early 1990s to give new jobs and homes to about nine thousand families relocated from Indonesia’s impoverished and overcrowded cities, part of a government initiative to reduce poverty. It worked for a while. At its peak in the late 1990s Bumi Dipasena produced an average of 200 tons of shrimp a day generating $3 million in export revenue. But pollution, poor management, and shrimp diseases have since taken their toll, and many of the ponds are now fallow. In fact, of the 2,300 square miles of mangroves that Indonesia cleared for shrimp farms over the last three decades—some of the highest rates of deforestation in the world—more than half are now idle or abandoned. Large-scale monocultures like this can be extremely productive and, at the same time, precarious.

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