LOFTY LODGINGS: A diurnal tide rises and falls twice each day in the Red River Delta, ranging from two to four meters across the coastal zone. At high tide, these dwellings, serving as watchtowers and homes for aquaculture plantation workers, look more like regular shacks.05/02/2007
The Powell River Peak
Powell River Peak reporter Luke Brocki travelled to Cambodia and Vietnam after winning a fellowship administered by the Jack Webster Foundation and funded by the Canadian International Development Agency.
The final installment in his series of development-related stories explores the impacts of aquaculture on coastal communities and mangrove forests in Vietnam's Xuan Thuy National Park in Giao Thuy district, Nam Dinh province, about 150 kilometres southeast of Hanoi. The people of this coastal area, like much of the population of Vietnam, rely on the marine environment for food and livelihood, but a classic tragedy of the commons is leading to environmental degradation and exploitation of resources at speeds that outpace conservation efforts.
Part four of a series
A national park under siege
Women in conical hats scurry around the shoreline, sifting through sacks of clams they just hauled ashore. A large, green scale buckles under the weight of load after load of farmed bivalves. The women pile the weighed clams into a truck and take rafts back to the dykes that house their nets. The burdened truck heads northeast. If recent history is to be trusted, it's heading for China, Vietnam's main importer of shellfish. The second of two diurnal tides comes in, flooding sparse stands of baby mangroves in Vietnam's Xuan Thuy National Park.
The park, in the Giao Thuy district of Nam Dinh province, may house the country's first Ramsar site-a wetland of international importance based on a 1975 treaty for the conservation and sustainable utilization of wetlands-but it has also caught up with the country's economic reforms and is facing habitat degradation, environmental pollution and dangerous exploitation of resources.
The economic reforms began in 1986. Dubbed "doi moi", or renovation, by the Communist Party of Vietnam, the reforms permitted and encouraged free-market enterprises and abandoned the push to collectivize the industrial and agricultural operations of the country. They also resulted in rapid economic changes in the country's coastal areas and conflicts over the management of collective property.
Academics working in the area draw parallels to Garrett Hardin's 1968 Science essay The Tragedy of the Commons, which introduced a conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good. The tragedy unfolds thusly: A coastline is shared by local clam farmers. The farmers wish to maximize their yield and so will increase the size of their farm whenever possible. Of course, each farmer receives all the proceeds from each additional clam they harvest, while the coastline is slightly degraded by each additional clam. Since all farmers share the disadvantages, the sensible course of action seems to be the further addition of clams. Economically speaking, this seems rational no matter how degraded the coastline gets, since the gain is always greater to each farmer than the individual share of the distributed environmental costs.
Doi moi's lasting legacy
But 20 years after doi moi, employment opportunities in the 15,000-hectare park and surrounding areas are limited, forest and wetland areas are greatly reduced due to unsustainable environmental practices and fish stocks are on the decline. Still, aquaculture continues to rise.
According to the Centre for Marinelife Conservation and Community Development, (MCD), Vietnam's only non-governmental organization (NGO) devoted exclusively to social and environmental issues in the country's coastal zones, livelihoods in the park are increasingly unstable and conflicts are growing. MCD believes solutions to poverty and livelihood problems along Vietnam's densely populated coasts must accompany answers to the region's environmental troubles.
Phung Thi Thin, 54, president of a women's association in Giao Xuan commune, one of five communes in the Giao Thuy district on the peripheries of the park's protected core zone, works to educate other women in the area about the harm of aquaculture and alternative livelihoods. "In recent years, people in this commune have increased aquaculture production and that destroyed the environment," she says through a translator. "I'm looking for opportunities to create new jobs for women and reduce the aquaculture exploitation."
The exploitation doesn't end with clams. The area is home to 46,000 people, many of them farmers eager to cash in on the area's crops, including oysters, crab and shrimp. It all comes at the expense of the park's mangrove forests, as farmers living around the park enter the core zone to farm. Vietnamese mangroves have been under assault for years, starting with the Agent Orange defoliation during the American war. The agent has since been discovered to contain cancer-causing dioxin and is again making headlines after a Canadian environmental company's recent findings that contamination levels in the city of Da Nang continue to exceed concentrations by 300 to 400 times higher than what is considered acceptable. The assaults on the forests continued in the forms of logging, expansion of rice farming and most recently, aquaculture.
Shrimp farming is particularly devastating to the environment, reports the World Rainforest Movement, one of the founding members of the Global Forest Coalition, an informal and inclusive coalition of NGOs and Indigenous Peoples' Organizations engaged in the global policy debate related to forests.
According to the coalition, shrimp farming tends to be a short-term activity, with many farmers moving into aquaculture without sufficient skills or money for sustainable infrastructure. The resulting farms render the land useless after as little as three years and more mangrove stands are then cleared to continue shrimp production. Intensive shrimp farming also uses antibiotics and chemical additives to increase yield, which poison the surrounding water systems.
Further mangroves are killed by high water levels, according to park director Nguyen Viet Cach. Shrimp farming also floods areas for longer periods than those experienced through natural tidal cycles. Since mangroves respire through the roots at low tide, Nguyen Viet Cach says, prolonged submersion kills the trees.
Then, there are social problems. A study by Nguyen Huu Ninh, director of the Hanoi-based Center for Environment Research, Education and Development, looks at per-capita income inequality across various livelihoods and finds that, in a nutshell, aquaculture makes rich land owners richer and poor farmers poorer. The trend toward inequality amplifies the pressure on poorer households caused by other factors, such as population growth, land limitation and rising costs of living, states the study. The response of many households is migration to cities.
Search for alternatives
The doi moi process, while reforming coastal life, has also increased economic opportunities in urban areas, agrees Phung Thi Thin. This has also affected Giao Xuan.
The commune saw an exodus of male labourers, lured away by construction, carpentry and transportation jobs in the cities. This led to changing gender roles, loss of skills in the local workforce and a weakening family structure. Now that women are responsible for managing land, Phung Thi Thin hopes education and community empowerment will catalyze a change. "With the support of MCD, we're training women in ecotourism in this commune," she says. "Women in this commune could provide services for tourists: cooking, hospitality, traditional performances, guided tours . . . "
Last July, commune representatives joined MCD officers on a four-day study tour to ecotourism sites in Sapa, a hill town about 400 kilometres northwest of Hanoi. The tour aimed to show community-based tourism in practice to the women in attendance and teach hands-on skills for future ecotourism in the national park.
Nguyen Thu Hue, director of MCD, hopes the ecotourism pilot, poised to enter a live trial this summer, will shift the region's focus away from aquaculture. "It's market-driven," she says. "Villagers know very well this practice is unsustainable, but if they don't do it, their neighbours will do it."
The former lawyer isn't praying for a miracle. Familiar with the country's bureaucracy, she chooses to focus the centre's efforts on grassroots advocacy on the ground and policy changes in government chambers. "In 2006, the environment started appearing on government agendas," she says. "One per cent of Vietnam's GDP (gross domestic product) is used for the environment, but action is very slow. The coast is very long and we're a small NGO."
MCD also works to analyze coastal problems and develop methodologies to fix them. "We closely monitor government development," says Nguyen Thu Hue. "Everything we do produces a paper, a report, a conference. We package the product to be sold to the government."
With today's national development efforts to greatly expand tourism, Nguyen feels an historic opportunity presents itself to improve the lives of many poor people, while restoring the coastal environment on which they depend.
Nguyen Viet Cach hopes she's right. "In Vietnam, money from so-called ecotourism doesn't go toward conservation. Hopefully this will change. In the future I hope there will be a law in place to funnel some of that money into conservation."
Xuan Thuy National Park is a snapshot of Vietnam's vast gallery of social change and Canadian research is paving the way to understanding the region's struggles. The links between agrarian transformation, industrialization, migration, urbanization, environmental impacts, globalization and geopolitical implications are being explored under the banner of the Major Collaborative Research Initiative program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A team of 21 researchers from three generations of scholars is collaborating on a project called The Challenges of the Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia, meant to reformulate the theory of agrarian transition in today's rapidly changing world. Research projects focusing on Vietnam and Southeast Asia's 10 other nations are currently underway at 16 different universities and research institutions. The result will include at least 45 graduate theses, most prepared at Canadian universities.
The final installment in his series of development-related stories explores the impacts of aquaculture on coastal communities and mangrove forests in Vietnam's Xuan Thuy National Park in Giao Thuy district, Nam Dinh province, about 150 kilometres southeast of Hanoi. The people of this coastal area, like much of the population of Vietnam, rely on the marine environment for food and livelihood, but a classic tragedy of the commons is leading to environmental degradation and exploitation of resources at speeds that outpace conservation efforts.
Part four of a series
A national park under siege
Women in conical hats scurry around the shoreline, sifting through sacks of clams they just hauled ashore. A large, green scale buckles under the weight of load after load of farmed bivalves. The women pile the weighed clams into a truck and take rafts back to the dykes that house their nets. The burdened truck heads northeast. If recent history is to be trusted, it's heading for China, Vietnam's main importer of shellfish. The second of two diurnal tides comes in, flooding sparse stands of baby mangroves in Vietnam's Xuan Thuy National Park.
The park, in the Giao Thuy district of Nam Dinh province, may house the country's first Ramsar site-a wetland of international importance based on a 1975 treaty for the conservation and sustainable utilization of wetlands-but it has also caught up with the country's economic reforms and is facing habitat degradation, environmental pollution and dangerous exploitation of resources.
The economic reforms began in 1986. Dubbed "doi moi", or renovation, by the Communist Party of Vietnam, the reforms permitted and encouraged free-market enterprises and abandoned the push to collectivize the industrial and agricultural operations of the country. They also resulted in rapid economic changes in the country's coastal areas and conflicts over the management of collective property.
Academics working in the area draw parallels to Garrett Hardin's 1968 Science essay The Tragedy of the Commons, which introduced a conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good. The tragedy unfolds thusly: A coastline is shared by local clam farmers. The farmers wish to maximize their yield and so will increase the size of their farm whenever possible. Of course, each farmer receives all the proceeds from each additional clam they harvest, while the coastline is slightly degraded by each additional clam. Since all farmers share the disadvantages, the sensible course of action seems to be the further addition of clams. Economically speaking, this seems rational no matter how degraded the coastline gets, since the gain is always greater to each farmer than the individual share of the distributed environmental costs.
Doi moi's lasting legacy
But 20 years after doi moi, employment opportunities in the 15,000-hectare park and surrounding areas are limited, forest and wetland areas are greatly reduced due to unsustainable environmental practices and fish stocks are on the decline. Still, aquaculture continues to rise.
According to the Centre for Marinelife Conservation and Community Development, (MCD), Vietnam's only non-governmental organization (NGO) devoted exclusively to social and environmental issues in the country's coastal zones, livelihoods in the park are increasingly unstable and conflicts are growing. MCD believes solutions to poverty and livelihood problems along Vietnam's densely populated coasts must accompany answers to the region's environmental troubles.
Phung Thi Thin, 54, president of a women's association in Giao Xuan commune, one of five communes in the Giao Thuy district on the peripheries of the park's protected core zone, works to educate other women in the area about the harm of aquaculture and alternative livelihoods. "In recent years, people in this commune have increased aquaculture production and that destroyed the environment," she says through a translator. "I'm looking for opportunities to create new jobs for women and reduce the aquaculture exploitation."
The exploitation doesn't end with clams. The area is home to 46,000 people, many of them farmers eager to cash in on the area's crops, including oysters, crab and shrimp. It all comes at the expense of the park's mangrove forests, as farmers living around the park enter the core zone to farm. Vietnamese mangroves have been under assault for years, starting with the Agent Orange defoliation during the American war. The agent has since been discovered to contain cancer-causing dioxin and is again making headlines after a Canadian environmental company's recent findings that contamination levels in the city of Da Nang continue to exceed concentrations by 300 to 400 times higher than what is considered acceptable. The assaults on the forests continued in the forms of logging, expansion of rice farming and most recently, aquaculture.
Shrimp farming is particularly devastating to the environment, reports the World Rainforest Movement, one of the founding members of the Global Forest Coalition, an informal and inclusive coalition of NGOs and Indigenous Peoples' Organizations engaged in the global policy debate related to forests.
According to the coalition, shrimp farming tends to be a short-term activity, with many farmers moving into aquaculture without sufficient skills or money for sustainable infrastructure. The resulting farms render the land useless after as little as three years and more mangrove stands are then cleared to continue shrimp production. Intensive shrimp farming also uses antibiotics and chemical additives to increase yield, which poison the surrounding water systems.
Further mangroves are killed by high water levels, according to park director Nguyen Viet Cach. Shrimp farming also floods areas for longer periods than those experienced through natural tidal cycles. Since mangroves respire through the roots at low tide, Nguyen Viet Cach says, prolonged submersion kills the trees.
Then, there are social problems. A study by Nguyen Huu Ninh, director of the Hanoi-based Center for Environment Research, Education and Development, looks at per-capita income inequality across various livelihoods and finds that, in a nutshell, aquaculture makes rich land owners richer and poor farmers poorer. The trend toward inequality amplifies the pressure on poorer households caused by other factors, such as population growth, land limitation and rising costs of living, states the study. The response of many households is migration to cities.
Search for alternatives
The doi moi process, while reforming coastal life, has also increased economic opportunities in urban areas, agrees Phung Thi Thin. This has also affected Giao Xuan.
The commune saw an exodus of male labourers, lured away by construction, carpentry and transportation jobs in the cities. This led to changing gender roles, loss of skills in the local workforce and a weakening family structure. Now that women are responsible for managing land, Phung Thi Thin hopes education and community empowerment will catalyze a change. "With the support of MCD, we're training women in ecotourism in this commune," she says. "Women in this commune could provide services for tourists: cooking, hospitality, traditional performances, guided tours . . . "
Last July, commune representatives joined MCD officers on a four-day study tour to ecotourism sites in Sapa, a hill town about 400 kilometres northwest of Hanoi. The tour aimed to show community-based tourism in practice to the women in attendance and teach hands-on skills for future ecotourism in the national park.
Nguyen Thu Hue, director of MCD, hopes the ecotourism pilot, poised to enter a live trial this summer, will shift the region's focus away from aquaculture. "It's market-driven," she says. "Villagers know very well this practice is unsustainable, but if they don't do it, their neighbours will do it."
The former lawyer isn't praying for a miracle. Familiar with the country's bureaucracy, she chooses to focus the centre's efforts on grassroots advocacy on the ground and policy changes in government chambers. "In 2006, the environment started appearing on government agendas," she says. "One per cent of Vietnam's GDP (gross domestic product) is used for the environment, but action is very slow. The coast is very long and we're a small NGO."
MCD also works to analyze coastal problems and develop methodologies to fix them. "We closely monitor government development," says Nguyen Thu Hue. "Everything we do produces a paper, a report, a conference. We package the product to be sold to the government."
With today's national development efforts to greatly expand tourism, Nguyen feels an historic opportunity presents itself to improve the lives of many poor people, while restoring the coastal environment on which they depend.
Nguyen Viet Cach hopes she's right. "In Vietnam, money from so-called ecotourism doesn't go toward conservation. Hopefully this will change. In the future I hope there will be a law in place to funnel some of that money into conservation."
Xuan Thuy National Park is a snapshot of Vietnam's vast gallery of social change and Canadian research is paving the way to understanding the region's struggles. The links between agrarian transformation, industrialization, migration, urbanization, environmental impacts, globalization and geopolitical implications are being explored under the banner of the Major Collaborative Research Initiative program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A team of 21 researchers from three generations of scholars is collaborating on a project called The Challenges of the Agrarian Transition in Southeast Asia, meant to reformulate the theory of agrarian transition in today's rapidly changing world. Research projects focusing on Vietnam and Southeast Asia's 10 other nations are currently underway at 16 different universities and research institutions. The result will include at least 45 graduate theses, most prepared at Canadian universities.
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