In Thailand, one operator found shrimp farmers calling Bangkok to get prices - and the upper hand on middlemen.

Corporate shrimp farmers then began to move their operations farther inland, leaving local shrimpers to contend with diminished natural supplies on the mosquito-infested coast.

Holding a plate of freshly cooked shrimp, Wichan Maungchanburi, a 41-year-old shrimp farmer, asked what price they would fetch in the United States.

"These are real tough times," said Sopun Kalljain, a shrimp farmer in the southern town of Lampo.

A shrimp farmer described the 1995 outbreak in Texas as "This thing spread like a forest fire... There was no stopping it.

Environmental groups convened a "shrimp tribunal" at the United Nations last year at which shrimp farmers from around the world were put on mock trial for environmental "crimes."

Like thousands of other shrimp farmers in Asia and Latin America, all Maitri Visetsak wanted was to get rich quick.

And so, much in the manner of slash-and-burn farmers, shrimp farmers simply march down the coastline, leaving hundreds of miles of poisonous brown blotches in their wake.

"I'd take a phone call from a shrimp farmer in Ecuador, and the next phone call would be a molecular biologist or a parent," he said.

The Bush administration decided earlier this month that shrimp farmers in those two countries were unfairly dumping their shrimp in the American market.