World Aquaculture 35 island. Many large sites that were formerly productive are now abandoned (Figure 2). Likewise, farmers in Bagamoyo on mainland Tanzania (Figure 1) have also changed their cultivation sites over time in response to die-offs. Farmers are able to tell the sites that they can use at a certain season of the year though those sites have been decreasing in number over the years. Farmers have changed cultivation sites according to the seasons or cultivation period and when that didn’t work some of them stopped farming while others reverted to the lower paying spinosum. Number of farmers. Although the change in the number of farmers has not been documented throughout the country, a study by Msuya and Porter (2009) showed that the number of seaweed farmers on Songosongo island has decreased over the years, from 809 during the production peak in 2003 to less than 400 in 2009. In Paje village on the east cost of Zanzibar, there were 1,400 farmers (both men and women) during the seaweed Fig. 2. An abandoned seaweed farming site in Songosongo Island, Southern Tanzania (note the pegs used for farming are still fixed in the sediment). (Photo by Flower E. Msuya) production peak (1990-1998) when cottonii was also farmed in the village, but in 2010, there were less than 200 farmers, all women. This is the case in many areas in Zanzibar as well as on the mainland. According to a study by Msuya and Porter (2009, the variation in the number of farmers by sex showed the “opportunistic nature” of farmers when it comes to farming seaweed. When seaweed farming started in 1999, the number of farmers increased sharply supposedly because the seaweed was growing well. There were fewer men than women as is the case in all farming
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