Thousands of coastal farmers in Bagerhat are struggling with a severe shortage of golda (giant freshwater prawn) larvae. District fisheries office figures show 54,848 golda farms needing about 586 million post-larvae a year, but working local hatcheries supply only 4 percent of that; the other 96 percent goes unmet or has to be found elsewhere, Amar Desh reported.
The shortage has worsened because four of the district's nine public and private hatcheries have long been shut. Even at the height of the season farmers are going from depot to depot without finding larvae, facing high prices, extra travel costs and losses from stocking late. The BRAC hatchery at Phulbari on the Bagerhat-Khulna highway lies abandoned and overgrown, its buildings and equipment decaying; Bagerhat Prawn Hatchery and Rupa Golda Hatchery in Morrelganj are in the same state. They were closed after losses, said Rahim Gazi, a worker at one of them.
Borhan Mallik of Khanpur in Sadar upazila, a prawn farmer for more than two decades, said he had never faced such a crisis. A virus wiped out the bagda (tiger shrimp) he stocked on borrowed money early in the year; to recover he decided to stock 150,000 golda larvae in his 100-bigha farm, but after five to seven trips to the depots he could never get them at once and had to buy 10,000 to 15,000 at a time at higher prices. Badiuzzaman of neighbouring Chakshri still had not got the larvae he needed late in the season, though April to June is the right time to stock.
Fakir Mohitul Islam Sumon, president of the Bagerhat prawn farmers' association, said real demand is higher than official figures, and the industry will struggle to survive unless the closed hatcheries are reopened urgently.
District fisheries officer Raj Kumar Biswas said five of the nine hatcheries are working and four are closed; with all of them running, at least 30 to 40 percent of demand could be met. The owners of the closed hatcheries have been written to repeatedly to renew their licences and resume work, and with no response the final process of cancelling their licences has begun.
Photo: Giant freshwater prawn, Syrist / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: Amar Desh
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