Observation Post 2- Mekong Delta
This past weekend, we all went to the Mekong Delta where we observed many facets of rural life and what life on the delta was like. Since this was the first time we had gotten out of the city, I was very curious about farming practices. However, I didn’t know that no one farms rice where we stayed because of the uncontrollable flooding, thus I was restricted to things I observed while on the bus.
I was very interested in the farming billboards as we passed by on the bus because they seemed so out of place in the relatively rural, mostly rice-farming land. The billboards were targeting farmers with fertilizer, feed, seeds, and skin whitening ads. I attempted to take pictures of all the ones that I saw but I wasn’t too successful because of the movement of the bus. In light of the recent removal of quotas on imported fertilizer in the Nielsen article about Vietnamese rice policy, I got really curious about the fertilizer/feed market. Obviously these products are very heavily advertised and used. In 2000, 9/10 farmers used chemical fertilizers (Nielsen 2002), a number which has most likely increased since the time of the study. There is also the additional factor that Vietnam only makes 13% of fertilizer used and imports the rest. I decided to look into some of the companies that I saw advertised.
Of the companies represented on the billboards, Biomin LINK was one of the only ones that I could find online. It turned out to be not a fertilizer brand, but an animal premixed feed company that also specializes in aquaculture. They export to every continent and sell products with scary pharmaceutical sounding names that claim maximum efficiency. The aquaculture product, AquaStar®, claims to “stabilizes water quality, improves pond bottom quality and supports the gut health of fish and shrimp, thereby improving performance and efficiency in production.”
I looked into recent news about fertilizers in Vietnam and found a news article written in July 2014 in Tuoi Tre News. The Vietnam National Chemical Group, Vinachem, is lobbying for higher tariffs on imported fertilizer. Imported fertilizers, mostly from China, are much less expensive than the ones made locally. The import tariff has increased from zero to three percent in the past year. This could double to six to “save” local producers of fertilizers from unsold stock. Prices of imported fertilizer will surge with the added import taxes and in theory prices will be more competitive so that farmers will buy more locally produced fertilizer
While we drove by I also saw a lot of farmers spraying their fields, generally with small packs carried on their backs. If I come back to this topic, I would like to look as this this is a little more depth- How much do the fertilizers cost relative to the profit form the crops? How much does the government regulate the application of fertilizers? What are the tradeoffs in applying chemical versus organic fertilizers for Vietnamese farmers?