Over the past two decades around a third of the world’s mangrove swamps have been rearranged,exchanged,conserved,convertedfor human use, with many turned into valuable shrimp farms. In 2007 an economic study of such shrimp farms in Thailand showed that the commercial profits per hectare were $9,632. If that were the only index,element,choice,factor, conversion would seem an excellent idea. However, proper accounting,percentage,aggregation,divisionshows that for each hectare government subsidies formed $8,412 of this figure and there were costs, too: $1,000 for pollution and $12,392 for losses to ecosystem services. These comprised,uneven,neglected,augmenteddamage to the supply of foods and medicines that people had taken from the forest, the loss of habitats for fish, and less buffering against storms. And because a given shrimp farm only stays productive,interactive,distinctive,collectivefor three or four years, there was the additional cost of restoring them afterwards: if you do so with mangroves themselves, add another $9,318 per hectare. The overall lesson is that what looks beneficial,immediate,moderate,modestonly does so because the profits are retained by the private sector, while the problems are spread out across society at large, appearing on no specific balance sheet.