This south Texas town amounts to little more than a thin line of about 500 dwellings, among them-trailers, Connie`s Paradise Bait Stand and a place proudly labeled the home of ”Oil Field Trash.”
Unincorporated and largely unnoticed in the Rio Grande Valley, Arroyo City doesn`t appear on many Texas road maps.
Nonetheless, Taiwanese investors found it, and over the past two years they have turned Arroyo City into the home of the nation`s biggest shrimp farms.
Now, just across Farm to Market Road 2925, the lone road through town, lie nearly 1,000 acres of rectangular shrimp ponds, troughs each five times the size of football fields dug into the black Texas clay.
In Cameron County, where unemployment is 5 percentage points above the national average, people are grateful for the shrimp farms` business and several hundred jobs. But since an accident last autumn, some people question the wisdom of welcoming an industry whose environmental effects are unknown and potentially calamitous.
During November`s harvest, tons of the farms` exotic shrimp somehow escaped into local waters.
Days later, after sport fishermen and bait shrimpers reported seeing non- native shrimp in area waters, state officials caught more than a ton of the Pacific white shrimp in the Arroyo Colorado, the stream that is the farms`
water source, and the Laguna Madre, the waters between the Texas coastline and its barrier islands on the Gulf of Mexico. Recently, some exotic shrimp were caught in the Gulf of Mexico for the first time.
No one knows what the ecological consequences will be.
The main worries are that the exotic shrimp will introduce new diseases to the native species and that they will compete with the local varieties for food.
”It`s quite alarming,” said Ken Johnson, a specialist in fish diseases at Texas A&M University.
Here in south Texas, where African killer bees have been seen since 1990, people could be expected to be leery over the introduction of a non-native species.
But they also are worried about making a living, and attempts to breed native shrimp in captivity, a pursuit that might carry fewer environmental risks, have been unsuccessful.
Gulf shrimpers are the most vocal critics of the operation.
”They were an accident waiting to happen,” said Deyaun Boudreaux, coastal environmental director of the Texas Shrimp Association, representing the owners of 700 gulf shrimping vessels. ”They assumed it was safe. It was very careless.”
But Harry Sun, general manager of Hung`s Shrimp Farms, one of Arroyo City`s two largest operators, said, ”We wanted to do good.”
At a public hearing on the issue in January, Sun reminded state officials of his company`s $14 million investment.
”We can`t just wrap up and go,” he said. ”If the farms are closed or if severe regulations are imposed, you`re never going to see another investment come over here.”
Few of Arroyo City`s 300 residents (800 in the winter) criticize the farms or question their safety. Kathy Harrington, owner of Kathy`s Drive-Inn Grocery, the town`s gathering place, general store and sole gas station, said her business has more than doubled since the farms arrived.
Hung`s Shrimp Farms turned a closed nightclub into its offices, and now gives the town free use of the building for such events as the community-wide New Year`s Eve party. Arroyo City had been plagued by burglaries, but this year was able to get a live-in county constable, said Wendy Horton, Harrington`s daughter.
”I think they`ve been good for the valley,” she said. ”They`ve put a lot of people to work.”
Tom Kilcrease, a retiree wearing a blue-and-gold Chung Mei Shrimp Farm cap, said, ”I have no fuss with them. I would say they have been pretty well accepted in Arroyo City.”
But he concedes, ”I think in the back of everybody`s mind there`s a little bit of concern.”
The environmental questions may not be answered for years, but legal repercussions are likely. State officials have imposed stricter regulation of the farms, some of which were operating without proper permits.
And the Texas Department of Parks & Wildlife is investigating to determine which farm is responsible for the accident.
Fishery experts concede that no matter what regulations are in place, shrimp will escape. Yet with Texas searching for new industry in the wake of the oil industry`s troubles, officials aren`t about to close the farms.
”There`s economic incentive to do things that are not morally correct,” said George Krantz, director of the Cooperative Oxford Laboratory, a Maryland- based organization that studies fish and shellfish diseases. ”Scientists are not as pure as one would think they are.”
But Texas A&M`s Johnson said scientific and public policy decisions on the subject aren`t simple.
”If you`re dealing with exotics, there`s never going to be `no risk,`
” he said. ”But if you don`t make attempts to introduce things that are potentially good, then you have the possibility of causing a risk to human endeavor.
”Where the balance is, I really don`t think we have enough information to say.”
