ENVIRONMENT-CUBA: A Desert Full of Fish Ponds

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

GUANTANAMO, Cuba, Aug 14 2000 (IPS) - Environmentally harmful fish- farming techniques have aggravated a long-running process of salinisation and desertification in the province of Guantanamo, at the extreme eastern tip of Cuba, where the rivers are also drying up due to lack of rainfall.

“We must act quickly because otherwise, in a few years, maybe five, we will have lost large areas, converted into desert,” warned Caridad Piedra, director of the governmental Provincial Soil Centre in Guantanamo, located nearly 1,000 kms from Havana.

Piedra complained that her agency had given the authorities in charge of developing aquaculture in Guantanamo timely warnings of the dangers that the construction of fish-farming ponds would pose.

The response to the warnings was “prove it” — which the research and, worse yet, life itself have done amply in the past few years.

But the case, which will be taken to the courts, is not the only instance of environmental damage caused by fish-farming. Some 300 kms away, the Maximo river has been badly polluted by runoff water from fish ponds.

Experts point out that due to the fish-farming ponds, built without any measures to minimise the impact on the environment, the water table is now 1.5 metres below the surface, rather than the previous 3.5 metres, which has led to saturation of the soil.

Furthermore, the salinity level of the soil has increased to the point that it has become virtually impossible to grow crops.

The ponds were built without measures to make them impermeable “in a region of alluvial soils, on land that stands much higher than the farming areas,” protested Venceremos, the newspaper of the governing Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) in the province of Guantanamo.

“And to make matters worse, the ponds were built without adequate drainage systems to get rid of the constant large flows of residuary water,” the paper added.

Cuba’s fish-farming programme, promoted since the 1980s as a major source of food for the country’s more than 11 million inhabitants, aims for an annual yield of 100,000 tonnes of freshwater fish.

Official sources report that production climbed from 50,000 tonnes in 1997 to 80,000 tonnes in 1999.

Experts at the ministry of the fishing industry also announced at the beginning of the year that the government’s “strategic priority” in drawing foreign investment in the sector was to obtain cutting edge aquaculture techniques.

The objective is to farm both fresh and saltwater species of fish, as well as shrimp. New shrimp farms are to cover more than 16,000 hectares.

The economic resolution passed at the last PCC congress, held in 1997, set a goal of no less than 300 million dollars a year for fishing industry revenues to be taken in using environment- friendly techniques.

But the rapid development of aquaculture in the early 1990s, prior to the enactment of the current environment law and regulations on environmental impact, could have caused even more serious effects than the ones already detected.

In 1996, aquaculture accounted for 20 percent of seafood yields worldwide. Most of the fish farmed — 15.1 million tonnes — were fresh water species, according to a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) report.

Rebecca Goldburg, a scientist with the Environmental Defence Fund, warned in a 1998 report published by the magazine Science that fish farming, previously considered a “green-friendly” alternative, actually posed a number of threats to the environment.

For example, runoff water polluted with pesticides and other chemicals damages fragile coastal ecosystems, the article pointed out.

The international environmental watchdog Greenpeace, meanwhile, reported that in the past decades, more than 3,000 hectares of mangroves were destroyed in the Gulf of Fonseca, in Central America, largely as the result of unsustainable fish-farming techniques.

Studies carried out in Chile have also found that ponds in which salmon and trout are farmed have become a major factor of contamination in seven lakes in that Southern Cone country, due to the high-phosphorus medicine and rations that the fish are fed.

In Cuba, the damages caused by the large number of fish-farming tanks that have cropped up in the valley of Guantanamo in the past decade can be observed today in the fields of independent farmers, and especially on the land farmed by the state-owned agribusiness company ‘Empresa de Cultivos Varios’.

The most costly projects aimed at recovering areas affected by salinisation and desertification have been carried out in Guantanamo for the past decade and a half.

The director of the “Empresa de Cultivos Varios”, agronomist Miroín Sánchez, who is preparing a lawsuit against the government fisheries office, said several banana plantations had to be eliminated due to the damages caused by the fish-farming tanks.

While millions of dollars are invested in the fight against salinisation and desertification, aquaculture companies do not even justify those losses with a high level of production, complained a government source, who preferred not to be identified.

Although the installations of the state-owned Aleviguan and Acuiguan, which run the fish-farming ponds, are designed to produce more than 700 tonnes of fish annually, production has never even reached 100 tonnes, the source pointed out.

Studies by experts on soil recommend measures to mitigate the damages, such as adequate drainage systems and the impermeabilisation of fish-farming tanks to keep the contaminated water from filtering down to the water table.

Research on the impact of aquaculture on human health and the ecosystem, estimates of the ratio between economic costs and environmental impact, and studies on how to correct the negative effects have yet to be concluded.

According to Cuban legislation, Aleviguan and Acuiguan are to assume the costs of such research. However, the government- monopolised press has reported that those entities claim that they lack the financing needed to complete the studies.

Cuba’s most pressing environmental problem is the fact that 60 percent of its soils have been eroded or depleted, deputy minister of science, technology and the environment, Fabio Fajardo, stated in June.

Erosion, acidity, salinity and poor drainage systems are the main reasons for the increase in the number of hectares where production levels are low, and are all problems that take years or decades to revert.

A United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report released this year stated that 16 percent of all land in Latin America is eroded or desertified.