Thousands of people — men, women and children — in coastal areas of Bangladesh, make a living collecting shrimp fry: some 40,000 in Cox’s Bazaar, nearly three times as many in Satkhira and Khulna. Despite the role of these people in sustaining the shrimp industry which generates foreign exchange earnings, they remain poor and under-privileged.

This paper is based on a socio-economic study of the shrimp fry collectors undertaken in 1987 by a voluntary agency, UBINIG (Policy Research for Development Alternatives). The aim is to obtain information and discover strategies to improve the lot of the shrimp seed collectors.

The study, and this paper which describes it, were sponsored by the BOBP’s project “Small-scale fisherfolk communities in the Bay of Bengal,” GCP/RAS/118/MUL. The project is funded by SIDA (Swedish International Development Authority) and DANIDA (Danish International Development Agency) and executed by the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). The project covers seven countries around the Bay of Bengal (Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Thailand). The main goals of the project, which commenced in 1987, are to develop, demonstrate and promote new technologies and methodologies to improve the conditions of small-scale fisherfolk communities in member-countries.