Study area The study was conducted in Bagerhat district, a coastal area of the Bay of Bengal, situated in the southwest part of Bangladesh. Geographically, Bagerhat has been identified as the most important and promising area for prawn culture, because of the availability of wild fry, favorable resources and climatic conditions, including the availability of lowlying rice fields, warm climate, fertile soil, and cheap and abundant labor (Ahmed 2001). This district is divided into nine sub-districts; among them Bagerhat Sadar, Fakirhat, Mollahat and Chitalmari are important for M. rosenbergii farming and the remaining are important for tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon) farming as a result of salt-water intrusion. Among the four prawn farming sub-districts, Fakirhat is the most important as prawn farming was first started in this area in the early 1970s (Mazid 1994). Fakirhat was therefore selected for the study.
History of the blue revolution Around 1978, a few well-off local farmers in the Bagerhat area of southwest Bangladesh began to experiment with stocking prawn in carp ponds. These innovators experimented with construction design, feeding, stocking and other technical aspects, and profited well (Kendrick 1994). Sometime between the late 1970s and the mid 1980s, a few pioneers developed the first prawn cultivation in rice fields in low-lying agricultural land. The name most frequently raised as the ‘father of freshwater prawn farming’ is Keramat Ali of the Fakirhat area in Bagerhat district (Rutherford 1994). When the people of southwest Bangladesh were enduring hardship, only Keramat Ali’s initiative changed the socioeconomic scenario of the whole area, and more broadly in Bangladesh, to earn a significant amount of valuable foreign exchange through prawn farming. Keramat Ali has received national awards for his outstanding contribution over the last 25 years.
In the late 1980s, the practice of prawn farming began to be adopted widely in the original location of the Fakirhat area, where prawns were grown along with carp and rice (Kamp and Brand 1994). By around 1987, a few local farmers first converted their lowlying rice fields into gher for prawn cultivation. Since then the pace of adoption increased dramatically as more farmers watched their neighbors profiting from prawn cultivation and decided to begin prawn farming as well. The news soon spread to other areas, and farmers in other parts of Bagerhat district began to adopt this new technology (Rutherford 1994). Although it has developed strongly in other areas, the number of prawn farms and farmers are still the highest in the Fakirhat area. There have been changes in economic activities in the Fakirhat area due to prawn farming which have led to its being called ‘the Kuwait of Bangladesh’ (Kendrick 1994).
Data collection methods Field research was conducted for a 12-month period, from January to December 2006. 2 A combination of the following participatory, qualitative and quantitative methods was used for primary data collection.
Participatory rural appraisal: Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) is a group of methods to collect information in a participatory fashion from rural communities. The advantage of PRA over other methods is that it allows wider participation of the community, and therefore the information collected is likely to be more accurate (Chambers 1992). For this study, the PRA tools—transect walk and focus group discussion (FGD)—were conducted with prawn farmers and associated groups, such as fry traders, feed traders, intermediaries, prawn traders and day laborers including women and children. The transect walk involved developing an understanding of a village, its farming practices and natural resources by walking the area in a straight line. The transect walk is not passively observational; it allows researchers to discuss with villagers who accompany on the walk (Chambers 1994). For this study, approximately 50 transect walks were carried out through the study area along the possible roads, involving discussions with over 1,000 villagers. This method was used to get a quick picture of the prawn farming communities in terms of the blue revolution.
Questionnaire interviews: Questionnaire interviews with prawn farmers were preceded by preparation and testing of the questionnaire and training of enumerators. For questionnaire interviews, farmers were selected through stratified 3 random sampling based on farm size. For this sampling method, a database of prawn farmers including farm size was collected from the Bagerhat District Fisheries Office. Prawn farmers were classified into three groups on the basis of farm size: small, medium and large farmers. Prawn farmers of each group were viewed as the population of each stratum. Samples from each stratum were selected following simple random sampling4 technique. A total of 180 prawn farmers, 60 in each stratum, were interviewed at their houses and/or farm sites. The interviews, lasting about an hour, focused on prawn farming systems, production technology, productivity, production constraints, prawn marketing, production costs and returns, and farmers improved conditions including socio-economic benefits.
Data analysis Data from questionnaire interviews were coded and entered into a database system using Microsoft Excel software. The statistical package for social science (SPSS; SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA) was used to analyze the data, producing descriptive statistics. Results from the data analyses, in combination with qualitative information collected through different data collection methods, were used to describe prawn farming with its impacts of the blue revolution. Comparisons among farmers’ categories were made by ANOVA F-test and a two-tailed P\ 0.05 indicated statistically significant differences. Economic analysis was conducted to determine net returns of prawn farming (Shang 1990). The analysis was based on farm-gate prices of prawn and the current local market.