ABSTRACT

Proposals to raise dikes in An Giang Province, located in the Mekong River delta, and Vietnam’s foremost rice-producing province, to heights which prevent the entry of all flood water, offers different potential opportunities for three groups of stakeholders: those with land; those with little or no land; and the state.

For farmers with land, the end of seasonal flooding offers the potential to choose which crops to grow and greater flexibility about when to grow them. However, high dikes also challenge the sustainability of rice growing. For those with little or no land, the end of flooding, leading to a greater range of crops and year-round production, can create year-round employment and opportunities for diversification of employment, including away from agriculture. Finally for the state, high dikes offer an opportunity to regain the control of water management from the direct control exercised by farmers through their ‘pumping clubs’. However, regaining control of water management also offers the state an opportunity to improve the livelihoods of landless and poor people.

Drawing on empirical materials collected in three communes in this province, this paper examines the dilemmas faced by decisions-makers. Finally it will suggest the impact of local decision-making process needs to be set within a wider framework of change in the delta, brought on by increased ‘grass roots’ decision-making on the one hand and the expected effects of climate change and sea level rise on the other.

INTRODUCTION

This paper focuses on history and institutional arrangements in the management of flood water in one province in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Interactions between farmers and the state have transformed the land surface of An Giang Province, located in the very South of Vietnam (Figure 1), from a seasonal flood-plain to flood-protected compartments. This in turn has raised agricultural productivity, leading An Giang Province to become the most prolific rice-producing province in the country. The paper addresses two questions: first, to what extent have farmers taken the lead in this transformation and how have they done so; and second, what tensions arise between farmers and the state when dikes are raised to heights which exclude the entry of all river water?

The paper begins by linking macro-environmental change in the delta to four major historical events. This is followed by an outline of how agriculture is carried out within August dikes and high dikes: August dikes delay, but do not prevent, the seasonal entry of river water, which rises up in the month of August; high dikes create year-round, flood-free conditions. The change from one to the other creates different potentials for agriculture. The relationship between farmers and the state is key to understanding the change from August to high dikes, and the following section of the paper sets out models of these relationships. Using empirical materials collected in An Giang Province between 2001 and 2007, the paper then addresses the questions set out above. Finally, two challenges to the present status of agriculture in the delta are identified followed by comments about how they might be addressed.

Figure 1. Location of An Giang Province in the western part of the Mekong Delta in the South of Vietnam. (Source: Howie, 2011)

AGRICULTURAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE MEKONG DELTA, VIETNAM

The Mekong Delta is a flood-prone plain of approximately six million hectares in area, two thirds of which lie within Vietnam and the remainder in Cambodia (Hori, 2000). Flooding usually occurs in August, when the level of water in the river, near the end of river’s four and a half thousand kilometre long journey, rises up and flows out into the fields adding to the monsoon rainwater which falls from July until November or December. In parts of An Giang Province (Figure 2) areas such as the Long Xuyen Quadrangle, within which part of this research was carried out, flood waters can reach 3 metres or more in depth. The provinces at the seaward edge of the delta lie within the tidal range of the East Sea and brackish waters reach far into the delta at each tide, making them problematic for the growth of rice (Koyama et al., 2001). Actual acid sulphate conditions are also widespread in the delta. In places the surface water may reach ph2.5 or less, and that also raises problems for rice. Nevertheless, despite these intrinsically hostile conditions, the Mekong Delta has become a highly productive area for agriculture, particularly for growing modern, high yielding varieties (HYV) of rice. In An Giang Province, interaction between farmers and the state has raised Vietnam from a position of food insecurity in the early 1980s to the world’s second largest exporter of rice at the start of the Twentieth Century.

Figure 2. Administrative divisions of An Giang Province and research locations. The province stretches across the two main branches of the river as they emerge from Cambodia, and includes the Long Xuyen Quadrangle, a depression that floods to depth of three or more metres during the flood season. The communes where research was carried out in Chau Thanh District are numbered 1-4. (Source: based on map of An Giang People’s Committee)

METHODOLOGY

The empirical material used in this paper was gathered between 2001 and 2007 in An Giang Province (Howie, 2011). Working in partnership with two staff of An Giang University, initially 46 farm households in three communes lying within 30km of Long Xuyen City were visited two or more times over a period of four years to build a picture of how agriculture worked1. . Later, working with a team of eight researchers from the university who were trained for their roles, two of the original communes and a third one were visited and seventy-two households were asked about the effect of high dikes, either their experience of them so far, or what effects they expected, should one be built around their land.

HISTORICAL EVENTS AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE IN THE MEKONG DELTA

‘An appreciation of the historical circumstances and events that preceded it (the retrospective)’ (Rigg, 2007) are important to understand the events of today. Environmental transformation in An Giang can be related to four principal events: the arrival of Vietnamese settlers in the middle of the Eighteenth Century (Li, 1998); the destruction of forests and seasonal marshes under French colonial rule in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries (Brocheux, 1995; Biggs, 2004); land redistribution which began in the 1960s, the so-called ‘Land to the Tiller’ programme (Callison, 1983) and which continued after reunification in 1975 (Vo-Tong, 1995); and the development of a market economy after 1986 (Kerkvliet and Porter, 1995; Vo-Tong, 1995; Vo-Tong and Matsui, 1998). To this must be added a key game-changer in the second half of the Twentieth Century: the development of higher yielding crops, the so-called green revolution (Borlaug, 2000), but with warnings about the sustainability of chemical-intense agriculture (Pretty, 2008) and the social downside of introducing non-indigenous crops (Shiva, 1989).

Vietnam expands southwards

Unrest in China in the Tenth Century AD at the end of the Tang dynasty provided an opportunity for the province of Nam Viet on the southern edge of China, to break free from Chinese hegemony. The country of Vietnam at that time existed primarily in the Red River basin and surrounding mountains until the Sixteenth Century when a movement to the southwest began. The move southwards was driven by a dispute within the ruling family, a desire to break free of the physical constraints of the Red River delta and from what some saw as the Confucian restriction on the development of new ideas in the north (Li, 1989). Overwhelming the Champa kingdom in the central highlands on their way, Vietnamese settlers began to arrive in the Mekong Delta in significant numbers by the Seventeenth Century. Once there, and helped by Chinese troops who had defected from the Emperor, they occupied the delta, constructed strategic forts along the natural banks or levees of the river and used their knowledge to grow flooding rice. These settlers regarded themselves as pioneers, even though the delta was occupied at that time by Khmer and Cham people, and earlier had been the site of the Oc Eo, a Hindu civilisation (Nguyen et. al., 1998). There is also evidence of early canal building from the Mekong River southwards, possibly to shorten the route from Cambodia to the sea (Brocheux, 1995).

Land accumulation and drainage by France colonists

Barely a century later, in 1859, a French fleet seized the port of Saigon in the south of the country, and in 1867 France declared the south of Vietnam to be the colony of Cochinchina. French colonists arrived with a hunger for land, and where the native inhabitants could not show documentary proof of ownership, French courts handed the land over to settlers: ‘Control of land was a key part of the French mission civilisatrice in colonial Indochina’ (Cleary, 2005). The Vietnamese land use system in the South differed from the system in the North, with land being held by individual households in the Mekong Delta, rather than the system of village holdings, which allocated land to households according to their needs and subject to periodic review, as practiced in the North. Where documentary proof of land ownership was lacking, which was frequent, large-scale land claims by colonists were granted by the courts. Colonists cut down forests and drained marshland on an enormous scale, irreversibly changing the face of the delta. According to Brocheux (1995), in just 50 years, over 80% of forests in the West of the delta were cut down and 1.4 million hectares of land were drained. Biggs comments (2004, p.67) that the pattern of canals dug by the colonists to drain the land was not based on a unified understanding of the delta’s hydrology: ‘canals were dug like the works of Penelope, projects without end’ (Figure 3). In place of forests, Cochinchina became France’s rice-bowl, drawn into the economy of the global North: in the years 1917 and 1918 Cochinchina exported more than one million tonnes of rice each year (Bulletin Economique de L’Indochine, 1921).

Figure 3. Canal construction in the Mekong Delta
There have been three major periods of canal construction: pre-1858; between 1858 and 1975 when many canals were excavated under French colonialism; and after reunification in 1975. Under the French ‘canals were dug like the works of Penelope, projects without end’ (Biggs, 2004) (Map: based on Nguyen et. al., 1998)