The Mekong Delta

Abstract

The Mekong Delta is the agricultural heart of Vietnam and home to nearly 20 million people. Its contributions to the entire country and global food consumers are enormous. The Delta’s delicate ecosystem, however, is distressed by several domestic and regional forces, including rural development, resource mismanagement, upstream damming, climate change, and failure to implement policies to link several systems. The authors examine trends and forces affecting the Delta and offer plausible adjustments to enhance the watershed’s well-being. Solutions will come from scale economies; higher value crops and branding; improvements to marketing channels, technologies to improve data collection and analysis, crop yields, and communication; foreign and domestic investment; and integrative policies to sustain Vietnam’s southern Delta and the entire Mekong Basin.