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GUATEMALA CITY – Mangrove forests in silt-laden intertidal coastal ecosystems provide a natural habitat for countless marine species, as well as livelihoods for thousands of families in Latin America and the Caribbean. But mangrove swamps are shrinking year by year, besieged by aquaculture, especially shrimp farming, environmentalists warn.

Aquaculture in “Latin America and the Caribbean showed the highest average annual growth in the period 1970-2008 (21.1 percent), followed by the Near East (14.1 percent) growth and Africa (12.6 percent),” says a report by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO).

“Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador and Chile, the leading aquaculture producers, have spearheaded this development, producing growing quantities of salmon, trout, tilapia, shrimp and molluscs,” says the study, titled The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2010.

But far from generating sustainable development, shrimp farming is destroying biologically diverse mangrove forests and estuaries in Latin America and round the world, without regard for the importance of these ecosystems for the environment and livelihoods of thousands of families who depend on fishing.

María Dolores Vera, of Ecuador’s Coordinating Body for the Defence of Mangrove Ecosystems (C-CONDEM), a non-governmental organisation, told IPS that shrimp farming was introduced in her country “in the 1970s, and had already destroyed 70 percent of the country’s mangrove ecosystems by 2008.”