The Bitter Migration
From shabby villages, millions of poor Vietnamese farmer migrate to cities to search for better job opportunities and livelihoods. While most Vietnamese officials still deny or refuse to acknowledge the environmental factors behind internal migration, the lives of millions of farmers and social sustainability are still strongly challenged by natural exposure.
By Phan Dieu Thu Ha
A hard life in the Promised Land
It was 7 p.m. and Nguyen Van Tinh went back to the slum house in Tu Liem District (Hanoi) with his working mates. Under the hot breeze of summer night, the 15-square-metre room appeared to be even tighter and more stifling for the 15 men living inside. Smelly mattress. Dirty pillows. No bathroom. No toilet. The nearby sewage drain even invited unwanted visitors to the tent: mosquitos! “Now I just hope to have some chemicals to kill the mosquitos. We can bare the heat but the bugs are so annoying, especially at night,” said the poor worker.
Tinh gave up his farm job in Phu Tho province and went to Hanoi, in hope of a life-changing opportunity. Here he’s been hired in a low-skilled job as a hand-puller for construction materials. Such an unstable and temporary job offers him more than what he could earn on the paddy farm. “Although it is uneasy, I am able to earn 150.000 VND (USD $8) daily. Minus the fees for food, I can save up to 80 thousand.”
In the cities of Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City or any other urban centre, it is not too difficult to see the slums such as where Tinh and his mates are living. With the little income from low-skill jobs, those workers cannot afford better places to live. Though here life is no less pressure than before, Tinh and Ti refuse to go back even though they still have arable land in their hometown. They do not want to be farmers again.
To stay is to die
To stay with the farm is to die back in it. Le Thi Boong, a 68-year-old farmer from southern province of An Giang, experiences this more than anyone.
Just finishing her harvest, Boong cannot feel any tip of happiness. With tears in her eyes, Boong shared her sad story about the big debts she now needs to pay. “This crop had too much rain, the productivity was so low. I sold all of my harvest but still lost up to 37 million VND. My youngest son was upset. He has left home to go somewhere for jobs. He has not been home lately.”
Thirty-seven million is just a small part from her loans from the bank. She bravely bared the uncertainty to ask for a large loan to invest in her paddy farm but sadly she lost most of it. All of her property now is an empty old house, a broken tractor and a rice-drying machine, which has not been used for a long time.
Floods, rain and many other natural risks keep damaging the work of many Vietnamese farmers. The continual loss and the uncertainty of farming force them to flee in order to survive.
Vietnam has never experienced such an unbalanced population and labor distribution as today. On the one hand, cities are getting alarmingly crowded, to the extent that newly built infrastructure cannot keep up, while there is an excess of labourers. On the other hand, rural localities are becoming more remote and vast lands are abandoned.
The poor remain poor
The loss of arable land and crop yields poses real threats and challenges not only to national food security and socio-economic sustainability, but also directly to Vietnamese farmers themselves.
The poor farmers are struggling to escape from poverty. Crops were destroyed. Financial aid from the government was slow to access. Agricultural workers could not find a way to re-invest in his paddy farm. Even if they could, the new crops cannot make up for the loss of the old ones.
A 2013 research project on farming families in 12 rural provinces concludes that an average agricultural worker earns less than USD $2,35 per day, whereas 50 percent of them have debts, mostly loans from high-interest private loaners. Tinh and Boong’s family are just a few among 41,5 percent of Vietnamese farmers who find agriculture no longer a guarantee for a proper life.
It is estimated that 6,6 million Vietnamese farmers have moved to urban centers over the five years from 2004-2009. This number might be multiplied a few times at the present.
Although it is undeniable that income and employment are cited as the primary factors motivating this migration, internal resettlement is also a consequence of consistently lost crops due to natural risks and unsafe livelihoods caused by climate change.
The consistent drop
After nearly 30 years of economic reformation, agriculture still plays an important role in poverty alleviation and food security in Vietnam, contributing about 21 percent of national GDP. Most of the Vietnamese population is still employed in agriculture, in which 80 percent of Vietnamese farmers grow paddy rice. Agriculture products serve not only domestic demand but also as major export items.
However, in the recent years, Vietnamese agricultural indicators keep decreasing.
The overall economic growth rate of rural areas in the last three years has been dropping from 2,37 percent to 2,24 percent and 1,91 percent. The annual growth rate of crop production has also decreased from 3,09 percent during the period of 2001-2006 to 1,94 percent five years afterwards. The growth rate of productivity per agricultural worker sees a very similar declining pattern: from 3,75 percent during 2002-2007 to 2,49 percent in 2007-2012.
The General Statistic Office of Vietnam concludes that the proportion of labor working in agriculture continues to drop consistently nationwide: from 55,1 percent of the employed population in 2005 to 47,4 percent in 2012. This number is far more less than the data in 1996 when 70 percent of the Vietnamese population was farmers. In 2012-2013 only, more than 42 thousand households either returned or abandoned an area of nearly seven thousand hectares of cultivated land.
So the less dependence on agriculture and the dropping number of farmers might be, after all, not indicators of healthy and joyful economics. Instead, it poses negative scenarios of climate change on half of the Vietnamese population, which its government absolutely wants to avoid.
The nightmare of natural disasters
The activity of agricultural production is heavily dependent on natural factors such as soil, water, climate, hydrology, temperature, humidity, and so on. It would be unsurprising that farming would be severely affected by the slightest change of weather, in which Vietnamese farmers are undoubtedly the direct victims.
2013 experienced the greatest lost in Vietnamese agriculture in the last 50 years, caused by irregular natural phenomena. Exceptionally, there were 19 storms attacking Vietnam in one year, double the number counted during 2012 and almost 5 times more than that of 2011. Hazards such as typhoons, rainfall, thunderstorms, flash floods, erosion and droughts ruined 280 thousand hectares of paddy rice and vegetables and swept away another 10 thousand hectares of fruit crops, contributing to the total impaired value at USD $1 billion. This shocking number is far more than that of 2012 ($750 million) and 2011 ($600 million). However, natural disasters are expected to strengthen, both in frequency as well as intensification.
GFDRR, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, considers Vietnam one of the most hazard-prone countries of the Asia-Pacific region, with storms and flooding responsible for economic and human losses. The country also ranks among the top 10 countries that would be severely affected by climate change by the Climate Risk Index.
Suffer and endure – it looks like a dark future still awaits Vietnamese farmers. Working in the paddy farm becomes more risky than ever. Agriculture, thus, offers little ability to help farmers to lift up their poverty, and does not even secure them with a proper life.
Shrinking farms
Most of the 9,4 million hectares of cultivated land in Vietnam is concentrated in the two major deltas – Hong in the north and Cuu Long in the south.
Sadly, a vast majority of these two Deltas are already around 2,5 meters under the current sea level, which makes them more vulnerable to any change of the sea level.
Farmers are losing farmland due to shrinking land and saline intrusion. At the present moment, four percent of Vietnamese arable farm is facing saline intrusion already, accounting for more than 1,3 thousand hectares. Another one meter of the rise is expected to submerge 40 percent of Cuu Long Delta, 11 percent of Hong Delta and another three percent of the coastal provinces, accounted for 50 percent of the paddy rice farm in general. 1,77 million hectares of arable land will be too salty to grow crops. The coefficient of land in use can, therefore, be reduced from the current three to four crops to one to 1.5 crops per year.
Rising sea levels would also significantly affect crop growth rates and pest incidence, which reduce the annual rice productivity overall by 2,7 million tons by 2050 nationwide and by 7,6 million tons by 2100, equivalent to 40,5 percent of the rice production in the region.
Without the most basic material to work, the future of farming seems dim and uncertain.
Vulnerable livelihood
The EACH-FOR project highlights environmental factors as one of the major motivations that trigger the internal migration in rural localities because of vulnerable livelihoods.
Natural disasters destroyed in total nearly 115 hundred houses and another 460 thousand of houses were partly damaged in 2013 only. Most of the loss is concentrated in the coastline and delta area, where the farmers worked and lived. The successive flooding events usually leads to destruction of crops more than one time, which drives people to migrate to elsewhere, mostly urban centers, to look for alternative livelihoods.
Although there exits no clear official conclusion of the migrating pull, it is observed that during the flood season, especially in the southern Cuu Long Delta, people undertake seasonal labor migration and movement towards urban centers.
Several childcare shelters in Ho Chi Minh City usually experience an influx of children after each annual flooding season. Often those children came with their families one or two months after the season, when the aid relief was no longer available. Families with children living in the vulnerable area, thus, moved to cities where there are more chances for work and safe shelter.
Environment, compared to other socio-economic motivations, might not be the main factors to trigger the migrating decisions at present. But as natural risks are getting more serious, livelihood stress might become the main motivation for internal migration in the near future.
A questionable alternative shelter
Climate change is very likely to have the effect of a ‘risk multiplier’ in Vietnam. The pre-existing vulnerability to natural hazards is extending, even covering those urban centers, which farmers choose to migrate to.
World Institute for Development Economics Research even predicts beyond the 2050 time horizon, Vietnam’s vulnerability is likely to increase dramatically, most obviously due to the threat posed by sea level rise to the concentration of economic activities in the two Deltas; whereas the International Water Management Institution even estimates that there would be around 10-50 million people in Vietnam at risk from sea level rise in the 2080s.
The decision to move to Hanoi, to Ho Chi Minh City and other big cities might turn out to be questionable. It is highly recommended that the government should discuss effective solutions and act immediately to minimize the later influences of climate change on its population.
Effective collaboration in demand
The long-term way out for farmers might not be to ‘run away’ but to fight with a well-constructed action program, with effective instruction from government and help from other organizations.
Famers might find cooperation and joining arable land a solution to adjust to the new working conditions. On small plots it is difficult to build up effective plumbing systems to help lower the saline level in flooding seasons and to regulate water levels in drought season. Larger plots are also better suited for mechanization, which can save labor efforts and increase productivity.
The government should also provide much larger attention to farmers and national agriculture. By far, most aid relief and assistance programs only come into effect after natural disasters have happened. However, this can be improved by helping farmers with generating new crops that are durable to pests and critical weather. Financial assistance with low-interest loans is essential to help farmers re-invest in growing crops.
Organizations, both international and domestic, both profitable and non-profitable, can act as a link between humble farmers and officials from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. Independent judgment and evaluation of what has been done and what should be done by the third party is necessary to learn from experiences and come up with better idea on how to help farmers stay with their land and work effectively on it.
The forgotten farmers
Climate change threatens every country, every profession, and every human being, and one of the foremost manifestations of the tension between climate change and the development that is the aim of the Vietnamese government.
The link between environmental factors and forced migration of farmers is sadly not acknowledged by the Government as it is supposed to be.
The Communist Party emphasizes farmers as a crucial and privileged class in the progress of industrialization and modernization. However, looking at the poverty farmers are enduring, and looking at their lonely fight with climate change, a question comes up: are they being forgotten?
Phan Dieu Thu Ha is currently studying in the Erasmus Mundus Journalism program in Aarhus. She’s worked at the Radio Voice of Vietnam in Hanoi as a freelancer for 4 years.
Pic credited to Jean-Pierre Dálbera via Wikicommons
