More than 35% of the world’s mangrove forests have been destroyed over the last few decades. Mangroves are some of the most productive marine ecosystems in the world and provide a unique habitat opportunity for many species and key services and goods for humanity. However, the continued regression of mangrove habitats can be attributed to anthropogenic causes, along with global warming. The most significant of these impacts is shrimp farming, one of the largest and fastest growing industries in the world. Qatar, in a bid to achieve its objectives of self-sustenance and food production, announced plans to construct a shrimp farm, which would ultimately become one of the largest of its kind in the world. However, shrimp farming has been associated with many negative consequences in mangrove ecosystems, and shrimp farming in would potentially pose a threat to the country’s mangrove ecosystems, which are already considerably endangered. In this regard, Qatar is bound to follow the same route if it does not take the necessary precautions.
In “Golden Spiles and Dubious Origins,” Kathryn Yusoff argues that,
This attempt to absolve the positionality of Western colonial knowledge and extraction practices, while simultaneously reinforcing and resettling them in a new territory—a Western frontier of pioneers armed with eco-optimism and geoengineering—indicates a desire to overcome coloniality without a corresponding relinquishing of the power it continues to generate in terms of who gets to formulate, implement, and speak to/of the future (3).
Many opponents of global environmental initiatives have argued that legislation and policies such as the Paris Agreement and the Green new deal are not necessarily an end-goal for the problems inherent of Anthropocene. Rather, many have suggested that degrowth and decapitalization could potentially solve many of these issues. Shrimp farming has many advantages in terms of land use, utilization, and improvements, particularly in terms of export earnings and relatively sustainable protein production. Qatar’s shrimp farm, which is projected to produce 300 metric tons of shrimp annually, will be situated in the Al Khor region, which also houses the Al Thakira Mangroves, one of the largest and oldest mangrove ecosystems in the world.
Coastal ecosystems, such as mangroves, are exceedingly important in the Gulf region, where only a few plants can withstand the hard desert conditions. Firstly, they are uniquely adapted to withstand saline seas, high winds, and infrequent rainfall, which are common in the Gulf region. They are also at the interface of the marine and terrestrial worlds, making them important in mitigating threats originating from the coastline, such as tsunamis, marine erosion, and hurricanes. While shrimp farming can be beneficial, Yusoff’s framework suggests that capitalism increasingly pervades Anthropocene, such that people ignore the negative impacts of human activities on the environment. Global warming is already a serious issue, as evidenced by Europe’s move to control carbon gas emissions with the Paris Agreement, and the more recent Green New Deal in the U.S. Seemingly, humans are more concerned about profits and economic progress without necessarily considering the environmental impacts of their actions.
Work Cited
Yusoff, Kathryn. “Golden Spikes and Dubious Origins.” A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
