- Venezuela’s aquaculture industry used to go unnoticed in a national economy revolving around the oil industry, but has gained prominence since 2019 despite revenue cuts and the economic crisis.
- Oil spills from disintegrating crude infrastructure compelled shrimp farms to move from an open system that took water from Lake Maracaibo and the Caribbean Sea, to a closed system that’s not only more profitable but also provides environmental benefits for communities and yields healthier shrimp.
- In 2023, farmed shrimp was Venezuela’s sixth-largest export by value; while the top export markets are in Europe, China has become the industry’s fastest-growing destination.
- While the industry has found ways to thrive amid adversity, it says it needs more help from the government, including on supplies of fuel and electricity, on research, and on nurturing a more secure and stable regulatory climate.
Most of Venezuela’s shrimp farms sit on the eastern shore of Lake Maracaibo, a brackish lagoon covering an area larger than the island of Sicily in the country’s northwest. This region is also Venezuela’s oil-production hub, and throughout the years, hundreds of oil spills have polluted the waters near the farms and damaged marine ecosystems that host native species of crustaceans. Yet despite this, Venezuela’s shrimp industry has grown exponentially in the last 25 years.
The sector, which exports about 95% of its production, has managed to tackle environmental threats from a deteriorating oil infrastructure and economic difficulties by switching its practices. But while recognized abroad for their progress, shrimp farmers still face hurdles at home.
Shrimp farming in Venezuela reportedly began in 1972, with the first experiments in the cultivation of native species of white shrimp (Litopenaeus schmitti) and pink shrimp (Litopenaeus brasiliensis), followed by the first imports in 1986 of immature Pacific white shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) from Texas, and the first spawning the following year. This was the first step by the Venezuelan government to initiate commercial shrimp farming in the country.
During the 1990s, production grew rapidly due to several political, economic and environmental factors: government facilities to obtain production permits, domestication of imported shrimp species, absence of viral diseases, increased investment, and attractive conditions for imports. By 1995, seven farms and one independent larviculture laboratory were operating; four of the farms and the lab were in eastern Venezuela.
With the turn of the century, the industry expanded westward, mainly due to greater land availability to create ponds, higher organic content in marine and lake waters, and a warmer climate, which favors rapid marine life growth.
Currently, there are more than 19,000 hectares (47,000 acres) of shrimp ponds across the country, spread among some 700 farms, according to Arnaldo Figueredo, executive director of the Venezuelan Aquaculture Society; half of them are closed or otherwise not operating due to the country’s economic crisis. Those able to survive and grow through economic hardship are owned by a little more than a dozen private companies.
Environmental challenges drive change
The biggest environmental problem facing shrimp farmers are the constant oil spills that pollute the waters of Lake Maracaibo and the Coro Gulf in Falcón state, Néstor Pereira, an expert in aquatic ecology and professor at the University of Zulia, told Mongabay. The spills keep occurring as the oil industry fails to maintain its infrastructure, especially following the wave of expropriations of the companies that repaired and maintained the 25,000 kilometers (15,500 miles) of underwater pipes in Lake Maracaibo.
In 2023, Venezuela recorded 86 oil spills, of which 84% occurred in the northwestern states of Zulia and Falcón, which host most of the shrimp farms and shrimp larvae production labs.
Until 2012, the impacts of these spills on marine and lake species were well documented, said Eduardo Klein, environmental impact assessment specialist and coordinator of the Center for Marine Biodiversity at Simón Bolívar University. But since then, the lack of funding for scientific research has left experts with a data gap on how species, including farmed shrimp, have been affected.
These obstacles pushed the industry to develop a more sustainable and efficient production system, while reducing costs and increasing productivity.
“The spills have led the industry to move from an open sea system to a closed…
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