Word: shrimping
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...native. Shayne set up a sea urchin processing plant in Chile in 1968, but was expelled by the government of Marxist President Salvador Allende in 1970 as an unwelcome American businessman. Shayne eventually wound up in Ecuador with $20,000 in his pocket and decided to go into the shrimp-packing business; in 1974 he started his first shrimp farm. Now a millionaire, Shayne is one of dozens of wealthy shrimp farmers in Ecuador...
...country's equatorial climate along the coast is ideally suited to the new industry. In an operation resembling the Central London Hatchery in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, adult shrimp are fished from the sea and placed in large tanks where subtle and carefully controlled variations in light and water temperature induce breeding. Pregnant females-each producing 150,000 to 200,000 eggs-are transferred by hand to separate hatching tanks, where an average of 90,000 eggs survive to become adolescent shrimp. After 17 days, always just around dawn to avoid damage by sunlight, the young...
Shayne's ponds are dug on the coastal flatlands, shored by timbering and fed by a canal. The square pools produce 800 lbs. per acre at each harvest, and he gets three harvests a year, a far higher yield than most of his fellow shrimp farmers, who average fewer than two harvests of approximately 300 to 400 lbs. each. In a laboratory up the coast from Shayne's ponds, experts work on secret methods for getting shrimp to produce more eggs; in another plant machines compact food similar to cattle feed so that it stays in one piece...
Shayne is already the world's biggest single exporter of farmed shrimp, although competitors are growing rapidly. Fish farming, practiced by the Chinese some 4,000 years ago, is producing shrimp in commercial quantities in countries like Japan and the Philippines. It is going on also in states such as Hawaii, California and Florida, and there is even a research facility in landlocked Arizona. Says Shayne: "If you do it right, this is the best business going. The returns are even better than from growing marijuana...
...profits are indeed substantial and have created a kind of gold-rush atmosphere in Ecuador. An investment of $1,200 to $2,000 per acre of shrimp pond could be returned in just six months. Says Joe Fischer, an aquaculture expert brought in from Hawaii by Shayne: "People are racing to get ponds dug, even when they have no idea what they are doing...