Farmers have harvested rice, millet and other crops from small plots handed down to them from their ancestors. Fisherfolk, like their fathers and forefathers, have repaired their boats and mended their nets along the beaches and have relied on small catches of fish and crustaceans spawned in the mangrove nursebeds. The way of life of these people has changed abruptly with the introduction and expansion of large scale, intensive shrimp farming. Today, governments offer to lease or sell the coastal lands to the farmers at greatly inflated, unaffordable prices. With no alternatives, thousands have been forced to work for wages on their own land, or to migrate to the cities for low wage work.
Police corruption is widespread.
When the people go to police with their complaints, police often refuse to register their cases. Local coastal people are being denied their right of livelihood. Where there is intensive shrimp farming, traditional life on the land and the sea is being destroyed. Water leaching from the shrimp ponds turn farmers plots into salinated wastelands nothing grows. Now, in the Indian state of Andhra and Tamil Nadu, basic food security is at stake.