Scarcity of fish in Mekong Delta’s flood season [- Could it be due to overfishing in the Tonle Sap by illegal Vietnamese immigrants?]

13/11/2010

VietNamNet Bridge – People in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta often say “as dirt-cheap as linh fish” but this statement is wrong now.

This is the flood season in this region but the price for linh fish at markets in Long Xuyen city, An Giang province is up to 180,000 dong (nearly $10) a kilo. Last year, the price for a kilo of linh fish was only several thousands of dong. Why has the fish become expensive?

VietNamNet reporters went in mid-October to Con Coc village, which is called the village of linh fish, in An Phu district, An Giang province, to find the answer.

Despite it being the flood season Con Coc was abnormally dry . Fishing equipment was placed along the road. Many fishing boats were not used.

“In previous years, if you went to our village, you would have to use a boat,” Nguyen Minh Chi, a local official told VietNamNet.

“The flood season is also the time to catch linh fish. This year flood doesn’t come so local people have to plant maize instead,” Chi said, pointing to a newly-grown maize field along the Hau river, a branch of the Mekong River.

Nguyen Minh Huong, 70, who has earned his living by catching linh fish for several decades, said he used to catch hundreds of kilo of linh fish in previous flood seasons but this year flood doesn’t come so he had to plant maize.

Nguyen Van Tong, a fish creel maker, said last year he sold nearly 40,000 linh fish creels to local people and clients in Cambodia. This year even his clients in Cambodia didn’t buy creels because of the low water level in the Mekong river.

“Young people in our village went to Cambodia to catch fish but they had to return home and in the end went to Saigon and Binh Duong to seek jobs,” Tong added.

The fishing season Bung Binh Thien in An Phu district, An Giang province, which is called the “God’s Fish Lake” because it used to be full of fish all the year round, is also poor this year.

“I have been drawing up nets from 4am but I until now (9am) I’ve caught less than a kilo of fish. I used to catch 30-40kg of fish a day,” Mrs. Lai Thi Hai said.

VietNamNet reporters called Huynh Quang Dau, director of Antesco company, which often purchase linh fish in An Giang during the flood season. Dau only said briefly: “Flood hasn’t come so we couldn’t buy linh fish this year”.

An Giang people said that in the past, linh fish was in plenty and it was dirty cheap. People used to buy linh fish to process animal feed. But now linh fish is very expensive.

“Linh fish comes from Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake. During the flood season, the baby fish go to An Giang’s flooded fields. At the end of the flood season, they go to the Mekong River to go back to Cambodia to lay eggs. Linh fish has become An Giang’s specialty during the flood season,” explained Doan Ngoc Pha, deputy director of the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development of An Giang province.

Pha said that many people thought that flood in the southwestern region is the same one as the flood in the central Vietnam. But flood in the southwestern region is the good time for local people to earn money from breeding and catching fish and planting specialty vegetables like nhut, bong sung and dien dien. This year they have suffered losses as flood water doesn’t come.

He also said that without flood water, the next rice crop will be not good.

He said that flood water doesn’t come this year possibly because of the dams built by China in the upstream of the Mekong River and the drought in Laos and Cambodia.

According to the An Giang Hydrometeorology Centre, the flood peak in the Hau river (a branch of the Mekong River which runs through An Giang) this year was only 3.05m, over 1m lower than last year. This is the record low level in dozens of years, except for 1998.