Top Stories

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam, May 7 (Newsmekong) - While investors and their opponents argue the pros and cons of an ambitious plan to mine bauxite deposits in Vietnam’s Central Highlands region, life for the tea and coffee farmers in nearby towns has already become a whole lot more complicated.

VIENTIANE, Apr 2 (Newsmekong) - On the banks of a remote section of the Mekong River in southern Laos, an area known as Siphandone, villagers quietly debate the question, which is more important to Laos: fisheries or building dams?

Vietnam has long aimed to overtake Thailand as the world’s top rice exporter, but it faces a number of challenges, including the creation of internationally recognised rice brands, before it can attain this goal.

Laos and Thailand have agreed on the construction of a third and fourth Friendship Bridge over the Mekong River. Thailand remains Laos’ largest trading partner, and the two countries benefit from tourists and visitors who go their border areas, especially where travel is easy. Already linked by land, air and water, a new bus route was added in early 2008 between the Lao capital Vientiane and the north-eastern city of Khon Kaen in Thailand.

“For ten years now, I’ve never missed a single Chinese fair,” says Ly Thi Xuan, who is of the Hoa ethnic group from Pho Bang town in Dong Van district, Ha Giang province in north-eastern Vietnam.

 The ‘Chinese fair’ is a weekly one held just five kilometres from this town -- but across the border in Yunnan, China, with which mountainous Ha Giang shares a border. Like Ly Thi Xuan, Pho Bang residents consider this fair in Ma Pung commune in Dong Cac district in Yunnan a big event, akin to a fair.

I saw only elderly people and children when I arrived in Nali village, home to some 200 people of the Tai ethnic group in northern Honghe valley in Yuanyang county, China’s Yunnan province. “Where have the young people gone?” I asked Li Xiaomei, a Tai woman who at 91 was busy making a clay pot in the same way her ancestors have done pottery for generations.

TAKHMAU, Cambodia - Hem Savoun is mixing plants inside a jar in order to turn them into organic pesticide. Next to where he works is a row of vegetables, testimony to Hem’s success in organic farming on his land on the outskirts of Takhmau near the capital Phnom Penh.

Mixing pesticides in Cambodia.

When the floodwaters in Vietnam’s southern Dong Thap Muoi region start to recede in late November and early December, it is a sign that the busiest time for fishing communities will follow shortly.

HEKOU, China - Packed in my luggage for a trip across the Vietnamese border to this town in Yunnan province was a scrap of paper with the name of a woman who works there as a welder. There was also a note from a colleague who works for ‘The Labourer’ newspaper in Vietnam: “You must try your best to meet with the mother and her son, and help them fulfill their wish.”

Female employees at a Chinese garment factory. 

PHNOM PENH (Imaging Our Mekong)- The air was choking hot; the sun shone brightly. Motorcycles were weaving their way through the busy traffic of vehicles and pedestrians as dust flew around on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital. Row upon row of establishments flashed by, before we came upon an inconspicuous sign with five Chinese characters: ‘Jia Hua Gong Ye Yuan’, or the Jiahua Industrial Park.