The coronavirus crisis has severely affected livelihoods, local industries and the economy in general. It has also disrupted world trade, supply chains and also the production of food and agricultural products and commodities. According to Samarendu Mohanty, Asia Regional Director at the International Potato Center, the production of wheat and rice in Asia would be heavily impacted if lockdowns to curb the pandemic and virus restrictions continue to be enforced.  

“If the situation lets up by the end of the month, we will still be okay to get in our normal planting. But the monsoon season where the most rice is normally produced is from mid-May to early July, so if we do not get the rice planted by then, we’ll see ripple effects start,” Mohanty explained to the media last April.

Some of the likely effects would include food supply shortages, leading to a full-blown food crisis.

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The post Cambodia’s Food Crisis In A Pandemic first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

The People’s Committee of the Mekong Delta province of Tra Vinh has decided to provide relief worth more than 40 billion VND (1.7 million USD) to more than 28,000 farming households to revive agriculture, which was severely affected by drought and saltwater intrusion in the 2019 – 20 dry season.

More than 23,410ha of rice, vegetables, sugarcane and fruits were damaged.

Households growing rice, vegetables and sugarcane will get 1 million VND per hectare if their crops suffered 30 – 70 percent damage and 2 million VND if the loss was greater.

For fruit orchards, the relief amounts are 2 million VND and 4 million VND.

Pham Minh Truyen, director of the province’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, said drought and saltwater intrusion have increasingly worsened and affected many farming areas.

In the dry season that ended last month, the saltwater intrusion began earlier than normal and affected most farming areas in the province, damaging many crops, especially rice.

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The post Mekong Delta province to help farmers with 1.7 million USD for drought, saltwater first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

The Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center (SBPAC) is joining hands with the Royal Forest Department and other relevant agencies in rehabilitating and upgrading community forests in the Deep South in order to generate employment and income for local residents.

SBPAC Secretary-General Rear Admiral Somkiat Pholprayoon said that SBPAC is promoting the development of community forests to increase forest areas for conservation and food security, reports the Pubic Relations Department of Thailand.

The centre has encouraged the people to plant trees on their premises, in their communities, and on public land, under the “One Subdistrict, One Public Land” programme. Local communities have also been encouraged to establish a “tree bank” for community forest development, based on the approach of the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej concerning the planting of three types of trees for four uses, that is, economic, agricultural, energy and environmental uses.

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The post Community Forests to be upgraded for food security in the Deep South first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

Food Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, the World Food Programme (WFP) are cooperating with the Lao Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry to draft a response plan and provide direct assistance to farmers continuing to produce food for their communities.

FAO, WFP now are completing an assessment of the COVID-19 impact on farmers and smallholders across Laos in supporting the ministry’s assistance to farmers including the supply of seeds, home gardening kits, animal healthcare items and technical support.

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The post Agriculture ministry, FAO, WFP ease COVID-19 food insecurity impacts first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

The pandemic is likely to make life worse for Thai fishermen as well as Vietnamese and Cambodian farmers. Restrictions resulting from the virus could limit food supply. The food security of 60 million people in the lower part of the Mekong River is in danger.

The emergency triggered by the novel coronavirus pandemic risks aggravating the already precarious conditions of Thai fishermen as well as Cambodian and Vietnamese farmers, who have been fighting for years against Chinese dams that have disrupted the water levels of the Mekong River.

Asia’s third longest waterway has been a source of concern for environmentalists and experts over the continuous and sudden changes in the flow of water caused by drought and upstream hydroelectric power plants.

On several occasions Thai fishermen have complained of a plunge in catches, whilst rice farmers in Cambodia and Vietnam have had to abandon their land and move to the cities because of shrinking harvests.

Alternating typhoons and prolonged droughts have compounded the problems caused by China’s 11 hydroelectric plants, five of which have been activated since 2017.

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The post COVID-19 can fuel more anti-Chinese resentment than Mekong dams first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

The post Food security concerns mount as COVID-19 disruption leaves Myanmar farmers unable to plant first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

Over the past year, severe drought exacerbated by upstream hydropower dams has throttled agricultural productivity, devastated fisheries, and threatened the livelihoods of millions of people in the Mekong River Basin. The coronavirus pandemic is compounding this situation, disrupting supply chains and increasing price volatility for rice and other staples. While Mekong governments have assured their populations of secure food supplies, concerns are growing around the affordability and accessibility of food for the region’s most vulnerable populations. Nowhere are these risks of growing food insecurity more evident than in Cambodia.

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The post In the Mekong, a Confluence of Calamities first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

The government is accelerating efforts to boost farmers’ yields to meet national food security strategy and production targets by 2020 in response to global climate change.

Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Dr Lien Thikeo made the statement during a recent address to mark World Food Day.

He noted that Laos had been hit hard by natural disasters, including floods in the central and southern provinces, a plague of caterpillars which invaded maize crops, and an outbreak of African swine fever in many parts of the country.

“This situation indicates that we will have short-term difficulties. And with the end of the rainy season food production will not be able to match the levels of last year,” the minister said.

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The post Laos intensifying efforts in agriculture climate change response first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

Sabo et al. (Research Articles, 8 December 2017, p. 1270) used statistical relationships between flow and catch in a major Lower Mekong Basin fishery to propose a flow regime that they claim would increase catch, if implemented by proposed dams. However, their catch data were not adjusted for known variation in monitoring effort, invalidating their analysis.

The Mekong River supports fisheries that are important to more than a million people (1) and these fisheries are threatened by the rapid development of large dams for hydropower (2). Sabo et al. (3) used statistical relations between flow in the Mekong River and catch in an important fishery on the Tonle Sap River, Cambodia, to design a flow regime for the Mekong that could be generated by coordinated flow releases from future and existing dams (4). Sabo et al. projected that their proposed flow regime would increase yield from the fishery by a factor of 3.7, providing additional justification for large dams on the river. We separately objected to this study on different grounds (5, 6) and later discovered that it used catch data that differ from the data reported by another study of the fishery using the same database (1) (Fig. 1). We diagnose the problem below, after describing the context.

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The post Comment on “Designing river flows to improve food security futures in the Lower Mekong Basin” first appeared on Open Development Mekong.

Hydropower facilities along the upper reaches of the Lancang, which becomes the Mekong River as it flows out of China, have led to major river-flow changes affecting Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, according to a study from Finland’s Aalto University. The study found river-flow changes affecting riverside communities’ ecology, livelihood and food security in those countries. It found that since 2011, hydropower facilities on the China part of the river have contributed to major increases in dry season flows and decreased flows during the wet season, when annual flooding helps ecosystems in the Mekong, a river basin system that sustains one of the world’s largest inland fisheries. The biggest seasonal flow impacts came in 2014, after the construction of the Nuozhadu Dam. It is the largest hydropower facility in the Mekong River basin, with changes to flows detected up to 1,200 miles south in Cambodia.

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The post China hydropower having major impact along Mekong River: study first appeared on Open Development Mekong.