Chinese dams, pollution send Vietnamese in Mekong Delta in search of greener pastures
- Local communities fear diminished prospects as the country’s agricultural powerhouse loses steam amid China’s upstream energy ventures
- With the delta’s fertility at risk because of pollution and other factors, can sustainable farming, renewable energies and a master plan reinvigorate the region?
“Saigon is the promised land for people from the delta,” said Long, who now works as an electrician at a restaurant chain. The son of a vendor and a hairdresser from Kien Giang province received his degree in electrical engineering from a university in Saigon and said about 80 per cent of the friends he grew up with had also left for the city.
“Where I am from, people farm all year round and there are not many jobs,” he said.
Like Long, about 1.1 million people have left the sprawling Mekong Delta in the last decade for opportunities in Vietnamese cities or overseas, as the consequences of environmental hazards, poor government planning and China-built upstream dams have combined to leave delta residents questioning the viability of their futures if they stay in the region and watch the natural riches of the Mekong slowly wither.
A recently released report by Vietnam’s top policy and economics experts and funded by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry found that the delta has the country’s highest emigration and lowest immigration rate. Its contribution to Vietnam’s GDP has also fallen steeply in the past three decades – going from about 27 per cent in 1990 to 17.7 per cent in 2019. The population of the delta region, which encompasses 13 of Vietnam’s 63 provinces and cities, now numbers 17.1 million.
“The inevitable consequence of this situation is that a labour shortage [in the Delta] is increasingly common, while simultaneously the ageing population has become a more serious issue,” said the report, whose authors included professors from Fulbright University Vietnam and Can Tho University, various business executives and researchers at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry.