Small Crabs at restaurants on the coast.
The www.khmer440.com roving reporter – Keeping it Riel – is down at the coast at the moment.
Yesterday in a moment of dire culinary concern he contacted yours truly.
‘Why are the crabs so small this year?’ - I will gloss over the initial set of jokes I made to KiR coming back from the coast with crabs….
The issues surrounding the question stretch further than just crabs, or the coast.
They relate to overfishing in general, due to an increased population that derives up to 70% of its animal protein intake from fish and other aquatic animals.
They relate to some illegal fishing gears damaging the natural habitat [electro-fishing, explosive fishing, et cetera]
They relate to small gauge nets catching fingerlings, as well as dam and trap fishing.
Of course poverty plays a factor, subsistence fishing helps to feed the very poorest families in this country.
But coming back to the question about crabs, strangely enough, part of the answer is to do with salt farming and the mangroves. Salt production has an impact on both the environment and land use in the coastal region as well as the local crabs and shrimps.
Until recently, there has been serious destruction of the mangroves, some for the expansion of salt farms. It should be noted that, once land is converted into salt farms it can only produce salt, and cannot be used for any agricultural purpose because of high salt concentration in soil.
The conflict between the owners of salt farms and shrimp/crab farmers is over water use, the salt producers want to drain or pump sea water to fill the salt farms while, the shrimp/crab farm owners do not want to because it disturbs the shrimp and crab breeding grounds.
Further conflict can be found between salt farms and rice fields, as salt water can seep into the rice fields [Khmer plumbing…] and affected the quality of rice growing because the land develops a high salt concentration.
So what can be done about this ?
Well, a report is being written …
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