VIETNAM: Rising Mekong Levels Test ‘Living with Floods’ Strategy

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam, Sep 13  - Rising water levels, the result of heavy monsoon rains across Vietnam’s southern Mekong Delta, are sounding alarm bells throughout the country, and proving to be a major test for its flood control strategy.

   Much of northern Vietnam has already been hit by flash floods and landslides.

   “Southern provinces should be ready to cope with the same situation,” Vo Thanh, deputy director of the An Giang Meteorology and Weather Forecast Center told the local media. An Giang province is one of Vietnam’s main rice growing areas.

   Vietnam is prone to heavy rainfall and tropical storms during the May through September monsoon season.

   According to the Vietnam’s Central Committee for Flood and Storm Control, floods and storms have become stronger and more destructive over the past three years.

   Floods towards the end of 2007 were followed by a rare prolonged cold spell. This, in turn, was followed by unexpected scorching weather and storms in early 2008, and then by recent tropical Typhoon Kammuri.

   These weather conditions pose a major challenge to Vietnam’s flood warning system, part of a broader strategy adopted by the government called ‘Living with Floods’.

    The strategy attempts to provide early warning of floods to mitigate the negative impacts and enable communities to take advantage of the potential economic benefits the annual floods bring, because they are part of a natural cycle on this region.

   In early August, inhabitants of the northern mountainous provinces of Lao Cai and Yen Bai, where warning systems against severe flooding were established in 2006, were taken by surprise by landslides and floods triggered by Typhoon Kammuri.

   A total of 129 people were killed, thousands of hectares of crops submerged and 189 bridges swept away.

   “The new pilot flood warning stations appeared to be inadequate,” Le Thanh Du, deputy director of Lao Cai Department of Agriculture and Rural Development,” told the media.

   The situation could also become critical in the South. “This year, floods in the Mekong Delta could go beyond Alarm Level Three,” said Thanh.

   Vietnamese meteorologists use alarm levels to indicate the degree of danger that flooding poses to rivers and dykes and the communities near them. Alarm Level Three indicates a critical situation.

   News of villagers in Northern Thailand being forced out of their homes by recent fierce floods without receiving any warning from local flood-warning systems worry Nguyen Van, a meteorologist based in Can Tho in the Mekong Delta.  “We should be constantly on the alert,” he told IPS.

   Meteorologists say the complex weather – tropical depressions and storms – will pour torrential rains to the Mekong Delta and add more water than usual to the on-going seasonal upstream floods.

   “The weather is definitely very bad,” said Nguyen Thi Xuan Lan, deputy director of the South Vietnam Weather Bureau.

   “From now to October, there will be around four more tropical depressions or typhoons,” Thanh told the media.
 
   “We should therefore make sure that our flood warning system works properly,” Nguyen Van said. He added that communities living along the Mekong River are better prepared to deal with floods than in the past. “People know they can not evade the annual flooding, so they manage to take the challenge and make the most of it,” Van said.

   About 20 percent of Vietnam’s 86.5 million people live in the Mekong River Delta, which produces 50 percent of staple food and 60 percent of fish for the entire country. The region accounts for 27 percent of the total GDP of Vietnam.
   Local people consider it a disaster when there is no flooding. However, they are also concerned when serious flooding claims human lives and causes economic damage.

   ‘Normal’ floods therefore are welcome, for they bring sediments to rice fields, help dilute soleplate, develop aquaculture, and balance the ecology.

   “Flood waters clean up the fields from pests and rats, and bring more fertile soil. This will yield farmers a good winter-spring harvest,” Van said. “Floods in the Mekong happen every year, so people have learned to make use of ‘normal’ floods while taking suitable measures to prevent possible disastrous ones,” he said.

   In 2000, the Delta experienced the worst floods in four decades. Waters rose to more than five metres, killing 500 people, more than 300 of them were children.

   Since then the government has launched the ‘Living with Floods’ approach. In addition to better flood warning systems, it included the building of hundreds of safe residential areas in seven flooded provinces and enhancements to the drainage capacity of local rivers.

   Farmers have been advised to restructure their cropping calendar, such as planting short-term, summer-autumn rice seedlings so that the main harvest comes before the floods. They can also take advantage of rising water to cultivate water-born plants, catch fish and shrimp or take up traditional crafts.

   “So far, some 80 percent of people living in dangerous zones have been relocated to safe residential clusters,” Van said.

   In last year’s flood season, An Giang earned 1.5 trillion dong (93 million U.S. dollars) from farming and fishing. “The ‘Living with Floods’ policy has yielded good results,” Van pointed ou.

“There remain some 30,000 families living along the rivers that have not been relocated to safe residential areas,” he added.  “They will face the risk of landslides if the coming floods turn into dangerous ones.” (END/IPSAP/TDTL/AN/JS/08)