| Shrimp and Rice |
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| Wednesday, 19 September 2001 | |
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Some 2,000 kilometers from its start on the Chinese border, Vietnam’s fabled National Route 1 cuts flat and straight across the Mekong Delta province of Bac Lieu. Lining the two-lane highway are houses and shops, many of them perched on stilts over canals. Bicycles, motorbikes, pedestrians, and buffalo carts hem the edges of the road, as buses, vans, and trucks career down the middle, vying noisily for right-of-way. The haphazard flow of traffic is routine. What makes this stretch of Route 1 unusual is how the road’s century-old embankment is now being used to regulate the flow of water to improve agricultural productivity. The results so far are raising questions that challenge the entrenched assumptions and priorities that govern natural resource management. Beyond improving the lives of poor Vietnamese farmers today, the lessons being learned in Bac Lieu may help other regions cope with a future affected by global warming. Farmland, like natural wilderness, is a complex ecosystem in which one altered feature can have far-reaching consequences. Managing natural resources in a way that ensures food security, promotes farmers’ livelihood, and protects the environment is a delicate balancing act. Until recently, very few farmers in Bac Lieu managed to grow more than one rice crop per year. This was due to tidal inflows of seawater invading the canals that crisscross the province. Only during the rainy season are tidal forces overwhelmed by the outward flow of fresh water from the Mekong River, bringing water and soil salinity down to a level that allows rice cultivation. The national government decided to remedy the situation by building a network of sluice gates that could be closed at high tide during the dry season, to protect rice lands from saline intrusion. Exploiting the Route 1 embankment as an existing line of choke points parallel to the shoreline, the Quan Lo-Phung Hiep Water Control Project called for the phased construction of 13 large sluice gates and many smaller ones. Ten of the large gates have been completed since 1993, and the saline-protected area has steadily expanded, allowing many thousands of rice farmers to grow two or even three crops per year. “Between 1997 and 2000, our rice production rose from 800 kilograms per capita to 1,200 kilograms,” reports Diep Chan Ben, the vice director of the provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. This clear benefit to rice farmers has come, however, at the expense of their shrimp farming neighbors, who were cut off from the supplies of brackish water they needed to fill their ponds. As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, divergent priorities have long pitted rice and shrimp farmers against each other. “Shrimp is too risky to try,” says 42-year-old Nguyen Van Mao, a successful rice farmer. “I grew up here and saw neighbors lose their farms and houses through shrimp failure. Rice production may have smaller profit margins, but it’s stable enough to keep my children in school.” Mao is fortunate that his cautious approach to farming is a good match for the soil of his medium-sized holding of 3.9 hectares, which remains fertile under the double cropping of rice that saline protection now makes possible. Many of his neighbors aren’t as lucky, because their soil is potentially acidic. A comprehensive study led by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and financed by Britain’s Department for International Development, highlights the problem. Can Tho University’s Dr. Duong Van Ni, one of IRRI’s local collaborators, explains that potentially acidic soil becomes actually acidic when it dries out too much. The recommended use for such land in Bac Lieu is to grow rice in the rainy season and shrimp in the dry, to reduce land-preparation time and keep the soil wet during the dry season. Aside from providing basic food security for farmers, the single rice crop leaves straw to feed the blue algae that are the main food for the following shrimp crop. Acidic soils are concentrated in “downstream,” newly protected areas of Bac Lieu. At the urging of shrimp farmers, officials recently began approving the occasional opening of some sluice gates to let salt water flow into these areas. The decision reflects rethinking of the government’s priorities away from the determined pursuit of higher rice production towards a more complex weighing of alternatives. The question now becomes how best to manage the sluice gates to balance competing demands: the shrimp farmers’ need for brackish water in the dry season, the rice farmers’ desire to retain the benefits of year-round saline protection, and the imperative to prevent the accumulation of pollutants in the waterways, to protect the inland fisheries vital to the poorest residents, especially the landless. Determining an optimum gate-management regime is a task of daunting complexity. IRRI water management scientist Dr. To Phuc Tuong, the Mekong Delta project manager, explains that researchers must understand the water quality requirements of rice and shrimp farmers at different times of the year, model how various gate-opening scenarios will affect water quality -- particularly salinity -- at different places and times, and determine which scenarios can satisfy farmers’ requirements. In partnership with farmers, researchers also test the sustainability of new and existing agricultural technologies and attempt to gauge the socio-economic impact of policy decisions. The Mekong Delta project marks a trend in agricultural research towards a holistic and integrated approach to using natural resources. This approach adopts a problem-oriented framework for tackling agricultural challenges. It strives to address issues linking agriculture and natural resource management beyond the field scale, and to bridge the gap between this bottom-up approach and the top-down view of planners and policy makers. Researchers hope and expect that the lessons learned in the Mekong Delta eco-region will be applicable in other parts of South and Southeast Asia, where two million hectares of tidal-saline rice lands are farmed by people who are among the poorest and most food-insecure in the world. Fears that global warming may cause sea levels to rise, pushing saline intrusion inland, lend urgency to the task. |