VIETNAM may try to limit international access to its vast Mekong delta under a new United Nations-brokered agreement for joint development of the river.
With the first committee meeting of the Mekong Commission just weeks away, Vietnam is seeking talks with fellow member Cambodia on limiting free navigation to just one branch of the Mekong.
Senior Vietnamese rivers official Hoang Trong Quang said the agreement on the Co-operation for Sustainable Development of the Mekong River Basin stipulated free navigation on only the main stream of the river.
Despite previous navigational flare-ups, Cambodian ships ply both the Mekong and its wider tributary, the Bassac, to move goods to Phnom Penh.
'It's going to have to be one of the first things to be sorted out,' said Mr Quang, permanent secretary of the Vietnam National Mekong Committee.
'The agreement makes it clear that free navigation is limited to the main stream, so we've got to sort out which one of the routes to Phnom Penh will be used by international ships,' he said.
Ships from all over the world call at Can Tho on the Bassac, a trading centre in the delta, which produces more than half of all Vietnam's rice and nearly a third of its gross domestic product.