Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta

Epilogue

227 Epilogue B uilding the nation” (xây dựng nhà nước) has remained a central priority for the Vietnamese government in the delta region since 1975. As with many new projects, however, older environmental and legal problems persist. Today, as in past eras, there is still one fundamental problem in the delta: finding solid ground. Today’s nation builders are faced with a more socially and environmentally complex situation as well. Population since 1975 has more than doubled to over eighteen million persons. Engineers and planners must navigate the historic built infrastructure that links old colonial-era towns that have grown into cities. Thethreatof risingsealevelshasonlyamplifiedlong-heldconcernsoverthe long-term viability of maintaining dikes and elevated roadways that may yet again become works of Penelope (never-ending projects). Furthermore, life in the delta in recent decades has been complicated by globalization of the Vietnamese economy. Increasing privatization of property and “ 228 epil o gue decentralization of state planning since the 1986 renovation (đổi mới)— market-orientedreforms—haveallowedahostof localagenciesandprivate firms to replace the state in some water management decisions. With the delta’s booming economy in export agri- and aquaculture, “building the nation” has thus become more deeply intertwined with building private fortunes. After a century of war and intense reclamation, the delta today, including many newly reclaimed areas in eastern Cambodia, is starting to resemble many other densely populated, highly litigated wetlands where powerful agribusiness interests and local powerbrokers lobby government officials and management boards to advance their interests. One need only attend one of the annual provincial trade fairs to see many of the same corporate actors—Mercury Marine, Bayer CropScience, Monsanto, ADM, and Nestlé—that one finds at similar events in Mississippi or the Loire Valley (fig. 31). Although there have been numerous stunning success stories such as the delta’s explosive growth as a center for rice and fruit exports in the global market and the much celebrated improvements in infrastructure such as the opening of a highway suspension bridge across the Mekong at Mỹ Thuận, many of the same environmental and social challenges that undermined earlier projects persist. With every severe typhoon or flood come breaks in river and sea dikes and consequent destruction of hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland that force more than a million displaced people to scramble to precious strips of elevated land. Since the late-colonial infatuation with casiers (polders), successive governments have continued a “Dutch dike” strategy to enclose floodplains such as Ðồng Tháp and the Long Xuyên Quadrangle. Until the advent of shrimp and fish aquaculture in the late 1990s, saltwater and floodwater were anathema to the state’s “rice everywhere” strategies, which were begun after 1975 to combat hunger. At first, with little access to foreign capital, the national government embarked on a series of large reclamation projects using mass labor; however, with market reforms in 1986 came access to foreign equipment and hundreds of millions of dollars to build and expand the system of sea and flood dikes. Combined with use of the International Rice Research Institute’s highyield rice, Vietnam went from being a net rice importer in the 1980s to becoming the world’s second- or third-largest rice exporter in the 1990s.1 As in the past, the national government in Vietnam faces intertwined environmental and economic dilemmas. Recently completed dikes funded by several billion dollars in international loans were designed for freshwater rice irrigation; however, as international rice prices slumped 229 epil o gue in the late 1990s, more farmers in coastal areas entered into the highly lucrative business of shrimp farming. To flood their plots behind the dikes with saltwater, many made incisions into the dikes to permit seawater to flow in. These largely unregulated acts have severely undermined the structural integrity of large sections of dikes as farmers and state engineers again get litigious over the function and form of the built environment.2 Often only a spectacular natural or man-made disaster is sufficient to bring debates over continuing problems of changing environments and public works into the limelight. In the United States, this happened after one-hundred-year-flood levees in New Orleans burst during Hurricane Katrina (2005) and inundated much of the city, killing over 1,800 people and incurring over one hundred billion dollars in damage. Four years later, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering concluded its study of...