Vietnam accuses Cambodia of being a conduit of "cemetery goods" to Vietnam

The 'cemetery goods' at Chau Long market

Recycled ‘cemetery goods’ flood Vietnam

13/07/2009

The ‘cemetery goods’ trading began in the 1990’s. At first, the goods were mainly clothes, including relatively new products, and were widely popular. Later on, cemetery goods came to include electronics, consumer electric products, children’s toys and many other consumer goods. The products are gathered from many countries, including the US, South Korea, Japan, Canada and Hong Kong, and carried to Singapore.

In Singapore, they are classified and packaged and then are exported to Phnom Penh or Rong Kloea flea market in Thailand. B.K.A, a big trader of ‘cemetery goods,’ said that nearly ten tons of goods reach Vietnam every day, a level even higher than the volume of Vietnam’s new garment exports.

An Giang Customs Agency said that since the beginning of 2008, the agency has seized 17,000 kilogrammes of used clothes and 4,000 metres of fabric.

VietNamNet Bridge – A huge volume of used goods from the ‘rich countries’ seeps into Vietnam across its border with Cambodia. The trade in seconds, irregulars and second-hand clothing, fabrics and electronic gear, unsanctioned but clearly tolerated, has flourished since the early days of ‘doi moi.’

In Chau Doc, a city in the Mekong Delta province of An Giang province, Chau Long Market has become well known as an entrepot for used goods ‘smuggled’ into Vietnam from nearby Cambodia. The people of the Delta call them ‘cemetery goods.’ According to Lam Van Tuoi, deputy manager of the market, some 275 households now trade in ‘cemetery goods’, including clothes, handbags, footwear and fabric.

The general depot of ‘cemetery goods’

Every morning at Chau Long, big trucks arrive to deliver goods. Bales of goods, one after the other, are unloaded from the trucks and carried to every household before they are delivered to customers.

Every bale of used clothes weighs 100 kilogrammes and sells from three million to over five milliion dong. Customers here are mainly wholesalers who carry the used goods back to their home provinces.

Another market, next to the Tinh Bien border crossing, specializes in foreign made fabric. At Tinh Bien, there are some 300 kiosks; many sell ‘irregular’ fabric or liquidated stocks of imported fabric at very low prices. Some fabric sells for only 3,000-5,000 dong per metre, so cheap that it is called ‘cemetery fabric’.

Like the used clothes, the fabric is sold in bales, each containing 50-120 meters of cloth.

“People purchase the fabric to make clothes or door curtains to sell at markets,” said T, a vendor at the Tinh Bien Market. Customers who purchase goods in big volumes need only provide their addresses and put money down; their goods will be delivered to their doors.

Imported footwear, wallets, hats, ties and children’s toys are also on offer. There are some ten traders of these kinds of products in Chau Doc town. The traders said they travel to Rong Kloea flea market in Thailand to collect goods to resell in Vietnam.

The route of the ‘cemetary goods’

At Tamau Market in Takeo, Cambodia, boats arrive from Phnom Penh laden with second-hand products, irregulars and overstocks: electronic goods, consumer electric products, bicycles and consumer products.

At Tamau market is the transit place, Vietnamese traders collect the goods they have purchased in Phnom Penh, Kompong Som port (Cambodia) and Rong Kloea Market. From there, the gods are carried across the border line to depots in Chau Doc town. From the depots, goods pour out every day to Chau Long Market and other markets in neighboring Delta provinces.

Tamau is but one of many cross-border transit places. There is a depot in Prekchray (Cambodia’s Kandal province). This is a huge, metal-roofed house containing many tens of tons of old fabric and clothes. Prices there are cheaper by 500,000 dong per bale, so a lot of Vietnamese traders come to Prekchray.

The ‘cemetery goods’ are also carried on boats from Phnom Penh through Bac Dai border crossing, and then carried along the track to Dong Thap in Long An province, enroute to HCM City, where the goods are re-sold in Ba Chieu, Tan Binh and An Dong Markets.

Wastes, too, are being brought to Vietnam

‘Cemetery goods’ are selling well in Vietnam because many Vietnamese consumers are happy to buy dirt cheap products.

Traders said that the quality of the illegal imports has deteriorated. Previously, every 100 kilos of shirts (400 shirts on average) had 170 first-class shirts, but now there are only 100. (‘First-class’ products mean the ones which still look new and have acceptable quality). It’s the same for jeans. Only 20 pairs of jeans are found ‘relatively good’ in every 50 kilos of the products, according to Tuan, who has been trading goods from Phnom Penh.

The threat embodied in these imports, says an environment official in An Giang province, is that Vietnam is becoming the place which consumes the refused products of the rest of the world’s countries.

Cross-border traders say that nowadays liquidated fabric from China’s textile factories have been carried to Cambodia to be re-exported to Vietnam.

Tuoi tre newspaper has reported that this kind of fabric has been purchased by private garment workshops which make low cost clothes, blankets, pillow cases and window curtains for sale in rural areas. Besides, the fabric is also used to make uniforms for workers and as lining for other products like handbags and seat cushions.

To ‘renew’ overly old products, the fabric is reportedly treated with chemical substances which are harmful to human health. Besides, used products may bear the germs of their original users.

The magic of 'Doi Moi' reforms or the tyranny of 'Doi Moi' oppressions?

The magic of 'Doi Moi' reforms

Saturday June 02, 2007
UMESH PANDEY
Bangkok Post

Developed Asean members should assist newer members with economic reforms, says Vietnam's deputy prime minister.

"What we need is the mutual support of members to narrow the development gap between member states," said Pham Gla Khiem.

Vietnam, which is the region's leader in terms of economic and stock-market growth, says it is continuing with economic reforms.

Vietnam's "Doi Moi" (renovation) reform policy - aimed at liberalising the communist economy while maintaining the government's authoritarian grip - has brought rapid economic growth. In 2006, the country grew at 8.2%, and 2007 growth is expected to reach 8.5%.

Mr Khiem says the government will continue with its reforms while maintaining socialist policies.

"What we have right now is an open-market policy that has a socialist face and this is our slogan too," he said. "We need socialist ways in order to care for the under privileged."

Mr Khiem said that these policies ensure that the rural masses benefit from the market economy. Vietnam, he said, would continue to liberalise its rules and regulations. He said that Vietnam is gradually phasing out old laws such as the 49% foreign-ownership restriction, and amending laws to conform to the norms of the World Trade Organisation.

"We need some time to adjust and it could take between five and six years, which we call as transition phase, but once this is done we will be far freer than today," Mr Khiem said.

Vietnam joined Asean in 1995, and attracted $10.2 billion in foreign direct investment in 2006.

"We will create a level playing field for all parties, be it domestic or foreign players, and create favourable conditions foreign direct investment," the deputy prime minister said.

The aim, he said, was to transform Vietnam into a middle-income country in five years and to achieve industrialised status by 2020.

He said that the country's abundant young and educated population would act as the catalyst for growth. Seventy-five percent of the population, he says, is younger than 40 years old and the population is set to grow to 100 million in 10 years from now from the current 85 million.

As part of this process, Mr Khiem said, the country had embarked on a major revamping of its state-owned enterprises, and more than 3,500 companies have undergone management changes to increase efficiency. The country will also privatise some state-owned enterprises over the coming years and hopes to complete the process by 2010.

"When we undertook the Doi Moi reforms, we were in the corner. China had implemented its open-door policy and the East Asian tigers were roaring, what we intended to do was to transform our subsidised economy a free-market economy," he said.

Vietnamese coastal wetlands facing environmental disaster

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.