Mother Nature and a hydropower onslaught aren’t the Mekong Delta’s only problems
https://news.mongabay.com/2016/10/mother-nature-and-a-hydropower-onslaught-arent-the-mekong-deltas-only-problems/
13
October 2016 / David Brown
Climate change and dams going in upstream are threatening to render the crucial region unviable. But are the Delta’s biggest problems of Vietnam’s own making?
- Vietnam's Mekong Delta, home to nearly 20 million people, is one of the most highly productive agricultural environments in the world, thanks in part to an elaborate network of canals, dikes, sluice gates and drainage ditches.
- On the strength of Delta agriculture, Vietnam has gone from a chronic importer of rice to a major exporter.
- But farmers in the region are critical of the government's food security policies, which mandate that most of the Delta's land be devoted to rice production. And many of them are taking measures to circumvent those rules, in ways that aren't always friendly to the environment.
- That's just one example of how water and land-use policy in the Delta is undermining efforts to protect the vulnerable region from climate change and upstream development.
Early this year, many Mekong
Delta farmers fought a losing battle against an epic drought, the worst since
1926. Was the drought a harbinger of climate change? Perhaps it was, but more
certainly it was an artifact of El Niño. The same ocean-warming phenomenon that
brought rains at last to my home in California deflected them away from Africa,
India and Southeast Asia.
The monsoon rains were light in 2015,
and tapered off early. Nonetheless, as soon as they’d harvested the autumn
crop, Delta rice farmers hurried to sow the winter-spring crop. They didn’t
reckon with an unprecedented surge of saltwater up the Mekong’s nine mouths.
Normally, saltwater intrusion might be expected to reach 40 or 60 kilometers
upstream. This year, however, it met only feeble opposition from the river’s
current. In lethal concentration, four grams of salt per liter or more,
brackish river water reached 50 percent further inland than usual, blighting
rice fields in Soc Trang and Bac Lieu, wrecking fruit crops in Kien Hoa and Go
Cong.
“The drought and the salt intrusion
was a necessary shock,” blogged reporter Dinh Tuyen, who covers Delta
agriculture for one of Vietnam’s leading dailies. “It showed us that we have to
wake up to climate change, and find ways to adapt to it.”
“There was drought also in 2010,” he
continued, “the previous El Niño, but not so bad.”
This
Delta farmer’s winter-spring rice crop was blighted by salt intrusion.
Credit
Dinh Tuyen, Thanh Nien Daily News
A highly engineered domain
When the Mekong reaches the
Vietnamese border, 115 kilometers downstream of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh,
two channels braid and then divide again, en route to the South China Sea
another 200 kilometers southeast, where nine mouths release most of the river’s
waters. During the river’s annual flood, a substantial fraction of the Mekong’s
waters also percolates across wetlands to the Gulf of Thailand 60 kilometers or
more to the southwest.
At the Vietnam-Cambodia border, the
river is 3.5 meters above sea level. Except for a few granite hills, the land
seems absolutely flat, a vast, soggy, intensively gardened plain.
The
view from atop a hill in Chau Doc, a Vietnamese town
near where the
Mekong’s crossing into Cambodia.
Photo by Vyacheslav Argenberg/Flickr
Seen from a temple atop one of the
granite hills, 284-meter-tall Nui Sam, the border is clearly evident. Land on
the Vietnamese side is densely cropped, laced by an elaborate network of
canals, dikes, sluices and drainage ditches. To the west, upriver in Cambodia,
the hydrological infrastructure is modest. It’s possible to imagine what the
Vietnamese part of the Delta might have been like 30 or 50 years ago: a
landscape enriched by annual inundations, well-suited to the cultivation of
“floating rice” varieties that can grow fast enough to keep foliage and seed
heads above the surface of the flood waters.
Floating rice was the principal crop
in the Delta floodplain until researchers in the Philippines developed short,
stocky oryza cultivars that produced huge heads of grain if water levels
were strictly controlled. The so-called “miracle rice” was introduced in parts
of the Delta that were under the Saigon government’s control in the late 1960s.
Adding ample inputs of fertilizer and pesticides, farmers produced harvests
several times greater than if they grew the traditional crop, floating rice.
After Saigon’s surrender in 1975,
experts from northern Vietnam took the place of U.S. agricultural advisors.
Under urgent instructions to expand food production, these officials mobilized
Delta farmers to build extensive river dikes. By disciplining the annual
floods, the dikes made it possible to harvest two or even three crops a year in
former wetlands, the Dong Thap Muoi and An Giang Quadrangle aquifers. And, when
market incentives and individual plots were reintroduced in 1986, that’s
exactly what many Delta farmers did. The reforms triggered Vietnam’s evolution
from chronic rice importer to the world’s No. 2 rice exporter. From 4.5 million
tons in 1976, Delta paddy rice production reached nearly 25 million tons in
2013.
Left:
The Mekong River and its watershed. The river originates in the Tibetan Plateau
of China, where it is known as the Lancang River; it then proceeds through
Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Right: The lower Mekong basin.
The river empties into the South China Sea. Images courtesy of Wikipedia and
Penprapa Wut/Wikimedia Commons
Hanoi’s ‘food security’ obsession
Even after the market reforms enabled
the nation’s farmers to produce huge rice surpluses, “food security” remained a
top priority of Vietnam’s communist regime. As its citizens’ incomes rose in
the 1990s, however, per capita consumption of rice fell. By 1997, Vietnam was
the world’s second-largest rice exporter. In 2012 — ironically a year before
Vietnam briefly nosed out Thailand as No. 1 — Hanoi decreed that to guarantee
sufficient land for growing rice for the foreseeable future, some 3.8 million
hectares, 58 percent of the nation’s arable land, would be restricted to rice
production. Of that area, 3.2 million hectares were designated for double
cropping.
What this means is that about half of
the Delta’s farmers have been locked into rice cultivation, though the profit
they could earn farming vegetables, fruit, fish or shrimp is far greater. In
principle, they are assured a modest profit on every kilogram of paddy, but the
state-owned Vietnam Southern Food Corporation makes sure that the price never
rises above a level that will cause it trouble exporting bulk rice.
The International Union for the
Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is skeptical of the government’s lingering
obsession with food security. Jake Brunner is the organization’s Mekong
projects coordinator. The higher dikes that enable three crops of rice a year
prevent flood waters from depositing sediment on Delta fields, he explained,
and so farmers must apply fertilizer heavily. Liberal use of pesticides and
herbicides is also needed to maximize the yield from new fast-growing rice
varieties. When the engineering and environmental costs of rice intensification
in the Delta are factored in, the IUCN calculates, it’s the companies that
build and maintain the infrastructure and the state-owned companies that export
high volumes of rice that make a nice profit. The region’s farmers just
get by.
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for a cocktail of pesticides adorn a rice demonstration plot in the Mekong
Delta. Photo by David Brown
Vo Tong Xuan agrees. The retired
rector of An Giang University is renowned in Vietnam as “Doctor Rice.” “Our
rice exports have increased but this has not improved people’s lives,” Xuan said. “Every year, the
government spends billions on construction and dredging, but these costs aren’t
included in the cost of rice production.”
However, some Delta farmers relish
the easy predictability of growing rice. “That’s understandable,” explained
Professor Nguyen Ngoc De, the deputy director of Can Tho University’s Rural
Development Department. “Growing rice is a lot less risky than taking a chance,
say, on watermelon and then seeing the crop fail due to lack of knowledge and
experience, or the market price collapse from oversupply.”
Other farmers are critical of local
officials’ stress on quantity instead of quality. Tran Minh Hai of the Ministry
of Agriculture and Rural Development introduced me to a farmer in a district
where three rice crops are the norm. He and most of his neighbors would rather
grow vegetables during the dry season, the farmer said. “It’s better for the
land, and would put more money in our pockets, but the government controls our
water, and our soil never dries out.”
The farmer described himself as an
early adapter who is very open to new knowledge. “I’ve developed a sticky rice
variety that grows well here. I am trying to figure out how we in this village
can market it as a special product. I seem to have hit a dead end: I can’t
market it as a varietal unless it is certified by scientists and the cost of
that is prohibitive.”
In another district that I visited
with the ministry’s Hai, some farmers had dug ditches and built mounds in
former rice fields. The water-filled ditches were alive with fish; on the
mounds, corn was waist-high. “They control their own water supply,” Hai
explained. “What these farmers are doing is not technically legal, but probably
some local officials have winked at their conversion of the fields.”
“It’s silly to maintain an annual
Delta rice production target of 25 million metric tons annually,” said
Professor De. “The Thai market ‘jasmine rice’ and the Pakistanis market
‘basmati rice.’ They sell it for twice the price that Vietnamese generic rice
fetches. ‘Branding’ our rice for higher profit is possible, but not easy.”
There is already a domestic market
for high-quality rice. Trendy urban consumers are snapping up packets of Hoa
Sua brand organic rice marketed by the Delta company Vien Phu, for example. “Our
problem,” explained a company official, “is that we can’t meet the
requirements for an export license, which favor trading companies that aim to
sell big volumes but don’t care about quality.”
Farm fish margins shrink as feed costs rise
Chau Thi Da heads the Aquaculture
Department at An Giang University. He told me that wild fish stocks have
crashed since 1995, when farmers began to raise local catfish for export. At
first, other river fish were harvested to feed the catfish, explained Da, but
within a few years, these were scarce. Still, business has been good. Exports
of river fish from the Delta now earn Vietnam $2 billion annually. The fish
farmers buy bycatch from marine fisheries for feed and are experimenting with
soybean meal pellets from the U.S.
So, said Da, even before dam
construction began upstream in Laos, parts of the lower Mekong had been scoured
clean of once abundant “whitefish” stocks. Nor are they likely to rebound, he
explained. The dam construction at Xayaburi in Laos prevents 64 of the 100
migratory species of fish in the Mekong from reaching their spawning grounds.
The Delta’s catfish fishery now relies on artificial breeding.
A
farmhouse sits on stilts above a flooded rice paddy in the Mekong Delta.
Photo
by Daniel Hoherd/Flickr
Near the coast, a surfeit of salt
At Can Tho University’s DRAGON (Delta
Research and Global Observation Network) Institute, saline intrusion is seen as
a gamechanger for Mekong Delta agriculture.
The 1-meter sea level rise that’s
foreseen between now and 2100 would put 38 percent of the Delta at or below sea
level, said institute director Le Cong Tri. Although Vietnam’s agriculture
ministry has proposed to extend and reinforce existing sea dikes, most analysts
believe that rising seas will eventually force a retreat to higher ground.
That’s a central assumption of the draft Mekong Delta Plan now under study by
the Vietnamese government.
During the past 30 years, the mean
sea level has risen off southern Vietnam by nearly six centimeters; meanwhile,
the amount of silt the river brings annually has fallen
sharply, from 160 million tons in 1992 to only 75 million tons in 2014.
Less rain is falling on the Delta,
too, report the Can Tho University scientists. Extrapolating a trend first
noticed in the 1980s, they foresee reduction in annual rainfall by the 2030s on
the order of 20 percent.
A
NASA satellite image of the Mekong Delta.
That’s not all. Where salt intrusion
is greatest, deep wells are being drilled into ancient aquifers to secure fresh
water. The high dikes that enable two or three rice harvests annually prevent
the aquifers’ recharging. So, particularly in Ca Mau, Vietnam’s southernmost
province, land is slowly subsiding, approximately 2 millimeters annually. It is
becoming inexorably easier for salty water to infiltrate rivers, creeks and
canals at high tide and spill over dikes and berms into rice fields and
orchards.
Since 1975, sluice gates have been
the preferred defense against tidal intrusion; they are closed during the dry
season, when river waters are low, and opened when the annual floods raise
river levels. This engineered solution to keeping out salt is controversial. As
the monsoon rains began in earnest this year, I drove through an area south of
Can Tho with my friend Hai, who taught at An Giang University before joining
the agriculture ministry. He is skeptical of the barriers’ worth. We stopped at
several canals that had been blocked to keep out seawater. All were stagnant
and foul. The invasive water hyacinth was crowding out lotus, a cash crop.
At another stop, we inspected puddles
of milky colored water. “That’s alum,” explained Hai. The soil in this part of
the Delta is strongly acidic. During the drought, the soil had dried and
cracked, allowing the oxidation of aluminum and iron. Now, with the beginning
of the rainy season, the metals were being leached from the soil. “This is
marginal land for rice farming,” he said. “Until these acid salts are washed
away by freshwater flooding, there’s no use replanting it.”
In Ben Tre province, Dr. Hai told me,
the giant Ba Lai sluice gate blocks one of the Mekong’s smaller estuaries. It
was put into service in 2004 to “sweeten” the river upstream. The barrier is
generally regarded as a poor investment because it has proven impossible to
flush out pollution for most of the year. In the dry season, the river water
above the Ba Lai gate is now too salty to irrigate vegetables or fruit. The
agriculture ministry’s dikes department, however, has a solution: more sluice
gates. The problem at Ba Lai, it argues, is upstream of the barrier: salty
water infiltration from other branches of the Mekong that are as yet ungated.
Turning to shrimp
Shrimp
from the Mekong Delta region. Photo by Lam Thuy Vo
Near the coasts of the South China
Sea to the east and the Gulf of Thailand to the west, in many villages the
groundwater is now naturally brackish. There — as at Ba Lai — tens of thousands
of farmers have concluded that rice farming no longer provides a viable living,
but shrimp aquaculture does. They are in a bind, however, if the land the state
has allotted to them is designated as rice land, and it is forbidden to grow
other crops. Unless, of course, local officials are willing to look the other
way while farmers open the sluice gates, anticipating a policy change that’s
been long in coming.
Shrimp farming has been big business
for years in parts of Ca Mau, Bac Lieu, Kien Giang and other coastal provinces.
In 2013-15, Vietnam exported $2.7 billion dollars’ worth of tiger prawn (Penaeus
monodon) and Pacific white shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) annually.
Some 580,000 hectares of coastal land have been ponded for shrimp culture. In
places where there’s enough rainfall to flush out salt, shrimp is the dry
season crop, and rice is grown during the wet months.
More than rice farming, brackish
water aquaculture is a tricky business; it requires careful management of water
quality, salinity, soil chemicals and other inputs. And, while the state
guarantees farmers a small but reliable profit on rice crops, shrimp farmers
are at the mercy of market conditions.
IUCN: Delta’s problems mostly ‘made in Vietnam’
When Vietnam’s long war ended in
1975, the central planners of the victorious Hanoi regime gave high priority to
boosting food production in the Mekong Delta. After initial reverses, they
succeeded remarkably. Rapid increases in the production of fish, shrimp, fruit
and especially rice fueled an export boom that prefigured and supported the
broader development of the nation’s economy.
These successes were not without
great costs, however. Today it isn’t just the likely impacts of a cascade of
huge dams and possible diversions upriver, of rising seas and changing rainfall
patterns that planners must contemplate. “The vast majority of the Delta’s
problems,” said Jake Brunner of the IUCN, “are ‘made in Vietnam.’ They can be
blamed on water and land-use policy in the Delta.”
Vietnam’s drive to produce ever more
from the Delta has hit a wall. Policies implemented over the past 40 years have
taxed the fertility of the Delta’s soil and severely compromised its
ecosystems. Sea level rise, changing rainfall patterns and human interventions
upstream are inflicting additional stresses on the farm economy.
In far-off Hanoi earlier this year,
the regime reaffirmed Vietnam’s hoary food security policy in principle (3.76
million hectares nationwide will continue to be reserved as “rice land”) but
retreated from it in practice (of this total, some 400,000 hectares of paddy
that’s subject to saline invasion can be planted in other crops so long as
“conditions required for rice farming are conserved.”).
In plain words, the government will allow farmers to grow more profitable crops
on land that’s become marginal for rice production.
To my Delta interlocutors in June,
mostly academics and a few “model farmers,” Hanoi’s decision was welcome. It
signaled that Vietnam’s leaders understand that adaptation to changing
circumstances has become urgent. But, when so many remain deeply invested in
the status quo, is bold action possible?
CONTINUE TO PART 4 & THE END
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