China’s crayfish boom is eating into food security, study warns
- Appetite for crustacean is encouraging farmers to give more land over to the industry and permanently flood fields, leaving less land for winter crops, researchers say
- Practice has proved a popular poverty alleviation effort, with incentives from local governments
The amount of land needed to breed the crayfish, commonly referred to in China as “little lobsters”, has also swelled, reducing the arable land available for winter crops, according to a five-year study by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
The study looked at the integration of aquaculture with rice fields, a common practice in East Asia, which involves breeding fish or crustaceans in paddy field trenches alongside rice.
The researchers found that farmers were digging wider trenches, and turning seasonally flooded paddy fields into permanently flooded ones to breed the crayfish, leaving less dry land for growing winter crops, China Comment magazine reported on Thursday, citing the study. The magazine is affiliated with state news agency Xinhua.
For instance, in about 667,000 hectares of the rice-crayfish fields in the mid-stream of the Yangtze River, about half of the land has traditionally been used to grow dry winter crops.
