"Niche Tanks and Coastal Sprawl: Species, and ... Thailand" w/ Jiang

In recent years, large coastal shrimp farms in Southeast Asia, once celebrated symbols for the Blue Revolution, have become a stand-in culprit for massive mangrove destruction and coastal pollution. Media reports have frequently blamed a large scale or the associated intensive aquaculture technology for causing environmental problems. Such assessment nevertheless tends to misrepresent a reality in which individual coastal farms are often small with heterogenous technological composition. It also belies a complex history in which malleable technologies in producing crustacean species co-evolved with Asia’s developmental states, international scientific philanthropy, and global business and extraction during the Cold War and beyond. In this talk, by tracing the evolution of interconnected bio-socio-technical packages of shrimp aquacultures that solidified in the 1960s Japan, 1970s Taiwan, and 1980s Thailand, I unveil how technological designs and business styles favoring different aquaculture scales took shape in three historical and national contexts, and how species and geography also mattered. In addition, the land-connecting, osmotic water environment offers us new food for savoring the question whether “small is beautiful.”

The artificial reproduction technique that has made cheap shrimp possible was originally adapted from a Japanese invention using kuruma shrimp, a highly priced species for exclusive gourmet cuisine initially confined to Tokyo and its vicinity. Shigeno Kunihoko’s niche tank featuring a large size, energy efficiency, and complete environmental control provided a postwar epitome of the “intensive aquaculture” that echoed a prewar fascination with efficiency in food production. However, the method was presented as a technological sublime instead of a practical business model. The rise of Taiwan’s large shrimp aquaculture industry, the first of its kind in Asia, not only relied on Rockefeller funded development of similar techniques in more sturdy species that favor a larger scale of production, such as the black tiger shrimp, but also hinged upon the physical and social infrastructure inherited from the colonial period that facilitated mid-sized operations and horizontal business integration. As Thailand joined the bandwagon with subsidy programs offered by the national government and the World Bank, the country’s geographical feature and stacked economic stimulation meant small, temporary farms with low technological input could receive a faster return. The vertical integration implemented by the Chinese-Thai conglomerate Charoen Pokphand Group only sped up the coastal sprawl and accelerated global extraction in the name of the nation’s economic salvation.

Speaker's Bio:

Lijing Jiang is an assistant professor at the Department of History of Science and Technology, the Johns Hopkins University. She is a historian of the modern life sciences and the environment. She is interested in questions regarding how epistemic and cultural interpretations and material manipulations of living organisms shaped the process of knowledge production and further material intervention in diverse cultural and political contexts, especially in East Asia. Her training began at the Center for Biology and Society, Arizona State University and developed further as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Yale University. Her first monograph in progress is titled The Entangled Model Fish: Nations, Environments, and Ornamental Fish as Experimental Animals. It gives a historical account of how goldfish, medaka, and zebrafish became model organisms in the life sciences in twentieth-century China, Japan, and the United States. Her second monograph is on the history of scientific aquaculture in East and Southeast Asia with the title Fish Nations: Species, Technology, and Environments in Asia’s Aquacultural Transformation. The project was recently funded by the Shelby Collom Davis Cetner in Historical Studies at Princeton University for the theme “Climate and Environment.”

Host or Publisher Center for East Asian Studies