Vietnam’s rice productivity may reduce 10% on climate change

VietnamNet Bridge: It is estimated that 90 percent of Vietnamese population would suffer from the climate change. However, the most worrying problem for Vietnam, an agriculture economy, is that the climate change would badly affect the rice cultivation.

The Mekong River Delta, the main rice granary of Vietnam, is at risk of losing 7.6 million tons per annum, or 40 percent of the total rice output of the region, according to the latest report of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD).

Vietnam is one of the countries which bear regular and heavy influences of natural calamities such as storms, floods, drought and desertification, riverbanks landslide and salinization. The sea water level rise would make 2.4 million hectares of land suffer from the salinity intrusion, of which the large 2-crop-a-year rice field areas would become unproductive. Especially, the climate changes have made the floods and pest outbreaks in a large scale in recent years.

Vietnam has been warned that the natural disasters would increase in the future in both the scope and the frequency which would bring unpredictable consequences. Natural calamities have caused considerable damages over the last 15 years, causing the death toll of 11,000 and the asset damages worth 1.5 percent of GDP per annum.

According to Pham Dong Quang, Head of the Cultivation Department under MARD, the droughts in 2010 and the droughts in 2013 in coastal provinces of the south of the central region and Central Highlands has caused the serious water shortage in some localities. This has made 16,000 hectares of rice fields unproductive....

A rice terrace in Vietnam, shot by jihadv, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license