Vietnam's 'food bowl' under stress
HO CHI MINH CITY - Vietnam's ecologically sensitive wetlands, which produce much of the country's food staples, including rice, fish and fowl, are now beginning to suffer the effects of over-exploitation.
"Environmental protection and economic development sometimes contradict each other," Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Environment (NRE) Pham Khoi Nguyen said recently, spelling out the government's dilemma.
But Nguyen indicated that the time had come for drastic measures to be taken to protect a vast region of shimmering paddies and mudflats, stretching from the Red River valley in the north to the Mekong Delta in the south, which not only "play a crucial role in ensuring the national food supply but (are) also home to delicate ecosystems''.
"The trend of making quick money by tapping wetland resources in Vietnam is threatening the country's environment," Nguyen stressed.
One-fifth of Vietnam's 78 million population makes a living by exploiting 10 million ha (hectares) of wetland areas for growing rice and aquaculture.
According to the current general conception, Vietnamese wetlands include the river estuaries, deltas, submerged forests, tidal plains with rice fields seasonally under water, offshore islands, marshes, lagoons, salt fields and reservoirs, and rivers and streams.
By that estimation wetland areas in Vietnam may reach one-fourth to one-third of the total territorial area of 330,000 square kilometers.
Earlier this month, Vietnamese environmentalists meeting in the capital of Hanoi to assess the indiscriminate exploitation of the wetlands and find measures to protect it, concluded that steps would have to begin with a legal framework and financial strategies.
Clearly, further exploitation of these areas demands careful planning with an ecological angle, neglected so far, the experts said.
The country, which has identified more than 30 wetlands for urgent protection, in 1989 signed the Ramsar Convention, an international agreement on protecting wetlands. However, the process of implementing the convention has been slow, and the Xuan Thuy wetland in Nam Dinh Province remains so far Vietnam's only Ramsar site.
Vietnamese experts now suggest the country request support from the Ramsar small-grant program to help it nominate more of its wetlands for the Ramsar status so as to better manage them and to halt their deterioration.
Much of Vietnam's largest wetland area lies in the Mekong Delta in the south, with its elaborate network of river channels and vast areas of rice paddies, mangrove and melaleuca forests, tidal mudflats and shrimp and fish ponds.
But rapid demographic development has resulted in greater demand for food, which in turn forced farmers to reclaim vast areas of wetlands by cutting down mangrove and melaleuca trees for charcoal, firewood and timber.
At Can Gio wetland, 50 kilometers southeast of Ho Chi Minh City for instance, 400,000 ha of mangroves are now under threat from illegal salt farming and shrimp breeding. "Last year, there were 123 violations of reserve regulations - most were for illegal aquaculture activities," Nguyen Van Thanh, deputy head of the forests' management board, told IPS.
"These illegal farms caused the destruction of 2.6 ha, and thousands of mangrove trees in the reserve have been cut down."
Can Gio has been named a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) biosphere reserve, and any attempt to farm, to take fish or wood from the reserve is illegal.
Like in other national parks and reserves in the country, some Can Gio people are allowed to live and farm in buffer zones that separate the reserve from the surrounding region. They are not permitted to carry out any production activities in the reserve.
But despite a US$6.7 million conservation project funded by Ho Chi Minh City, illegal farming and logging remain a major problem for reserve officials.
"Local people have taken 12 ha of forest land for their personal use," Thanh said, adding that all the forest land along the 19 kilometer road to Can Gio commune had been converted into shrimp ponds and salt fields.
"They were taking a little more land each day," ranger Nguyen Duc Mien told IPS. "It is difficult to discover the violations because they take such a small amount each day." After four months, a family could take nearly one hectare of mangrove land to breed shrimp.
The threat to the ecology system is serious. Last year, rangers seized 500 kilograms of endangered reptiles and birds, besides mangrove wood cut down illegally. "That is only a small portion of what poachers and loggers have taken away," Mien said.
"We should find sustainable ways to manage wetlands in ways that help local people fight poverty and preserve biodiversity," Nguyen Duc Tu of Bird Life International's Vietnam Programme told the Hanoi meeting.
Tu said that as the Arctic summer ends, thousands of shorebirds migrate to the wetlands of Vietnam from the north. They feed on small worms and crustaceans that burrow in coastal mud flats where thousands of people make their living by collecting shellfish.
Wetlands are places of transition, where water and forest, fishery and farm meet and often overlap. In Vietnam, wetlands directly provide a source of livelihood for local people and provide environment services - from flood control to water purification and biodiversity conservation - that indirectly support the broader economy.
The transitional nature of wetlands means they defy conventional, sectorial approaches to natural resources management. In Vietnam, no single agency has a mandate to manage the country's wetlands, with rights of use and access undefined so that conflict between government agencies and communities are frequent.
Some agencies and communities are not fully aware of the special features of wetlands - their equally important environmental and economic functions - and therefore focus more on exploiting wetlands to increase food production.
While the government passed three laws regulating wetland management in 1994-95, an effective and comprehensive legal framework for wetlands protection and management is still lacking.
So far, the $65.7 million multilateral project to help restore the Mekong Delta's depleted coastal mangrove swamps remains the biggest wetland investment.
Entitled "The Coastal Wetlands Protection and Development Project", it is to be implemented between 2000 and 2006 and covers wetlands in four provinces of the Mekong Delta. Over the past 20 years, the area has lost well over half its cover, mainly due to unsustainable logging and failed shrimp farm developments.
Project coordinators want to establish a "full protection zone" and introduce diversified and sustainable farming techniques in an adjacent "buffer zone". They also want to limit economic activities and coastal developments that pose a threat to the mangrove swamps.
Unfortunately, these measures have met with strong resistance from local agencies and communities that are more concerned with economic development than ecology protection.
By Tran Dinh Thanh Lam - Inter Press Service - September 22, 2005.
|