Clam farmers in Tainan and Changhua and Yunlin counties have suffered severe losses as more than 90 percent of their stock have died off over the past few days.
The massive depopulation of clams has caused prices to spike to NT$70 (US$2.29) per jin (斤, 600g) at farms, and NT$80 to NT$90 at traditional markets, producers said.
Larger clams have sold for between NT$100 and NT$130 per jin, they said.
Photo: Huang Shu-li, Taipei Times
Prices for clam seed have also risen to NT$130 per jin due to poor growth rates, they said.
Yesterday, during an inspection of a clam farm owned by Lin Ming-sheng (林明生) by Yunlin County Commissioner Lee Chin-yung (李進勇) and representatives from the Fisheries Research Institute, Lin grabbed several handfuls of clams, 99 percent of which were dead.
Lin said he had spent between NT$2 million and NT$3 million on his 7-hectare farm and would have made between NT$6 million and NT$7 million if all the clams had lived.
He called on the government to find out the cause of the mass deaths of clams, adding that governmental subsidies could only cover so much.
Clam farmers said that coastal weather has seen as much as a 20oC difference in temperature and a heat wave this week worsened the situation.
Several farmers said they had just planted clam seeds in their ponds, only to see them all die in three days.
Yeh Hsin-li (葉信利), director of the institute’s Marine Reproduction and Research Center, said that the mass deaths might have been caused by abnormal weather, overcrowding on farms, narrowing of the clam gene pool, Vibrio infection or changes to the ground layer of the ponds.
The center will try to help alleviate the shortage by raising clams, Yeh said.
It recommended that farmers reduce overcrowding on farms and drain their ponds to allow the bottom layer to be disinfected via sunlight.
Lee called on the Council of Agriculture to consider compensating clam farmers by treating the mass deaths as a natural disaster.
Additional reporting by Chen Tsan-kun
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