The High Price of Cheap Shrimp
Cristhian Castro sinks knee-deep into grayish mud. The endless tangle of aerial roots around him makes mangrove trees look as if they are standing on legs, ready to run off at any moment. Castro, 39, has been navigating this muddy maze in Ecuador’s Guayas River estuary six days a week for more than 25 years, hunting for delicious treasures. He is a cangrejero—artisanal crab catcher—and a fisherman, just like his father, and his father’s father.
“We, the people who are here, living by the riverbanks, in the mangroves, we have a great love for nature,” says Castro. “Nature here has allowed us to dress and feed ourselves, and even that our children can study.” Castro is the president of the Puerto Envidia Association of Crabbers and Fishermen, and his group, along with other artisanal fishing associations, is increasingly at the forefront of the fight to protect the estuary’s ecosystem.
Spilling across approximately 4,600 square miles, the Guayas River estuary is the largest on the Pacific coast of South America. Its network contains 23 tributaries, dozens of small islands, tidal flats, and around 60,800 hectares of mangrove forests that jut into the Gulf of Guayaquil. The city of Guayaquil, with almost 2.7 million inhabitants, sits at the estuary’s upper part, where the Daule and the Babahoyo rivers meet to form the Guayas.
The value of Ecuador’s shrimp exports is $5 billion, making it one of the shrimp capitals of the world.
Guayaquil is a city of superlatives: It’s Ecuador’s largest city, biggest port, most important economic hub—and it is also the planet’s fourth-most vulnerable city to future flooding due to climate change. According to Climate Central, an independent organization of climate scientists and journalists, most of the estuary and big chunks of Guayaquil could be underwater or regularly flooded by the unless the region improves its resilience. A in estimates that even under a mild future climate scenario—about a 7.8-inch sea-level rise by 2050—the city’s average annual losses from flooding could reach almost $3.2 billion, even if it bolsters its defenses.
