Environmental Change and Agricultural Sustainability in the Mekong Delta (Advances in Global Change Research)

The Mekong Delta of Vietnam is one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world.  The Mekong River fans out over an area of about 40,000 sq kilometers and over the course of many millennia has produced a region of fertile alluvial soils and constant flows of energy.  Today about a fourth of the Delta is under rice cultivation, making this area one of the premier rice granaries in the world.  The Delta has always proven a difficult environment to manipulate, however, and because of population pressures, increasing acidification of soils, and changes in the Mekong’s flow, environmental problems have intensified.   The changing way in which the region has been linked to larger flows of commodities and capital over time has also had an impact on the region: For example, its re-emergence in recent decades as a major rice-exporting area has linked it inextricably to global markets and their vicissitudes.  And most recently, the potential for sea level increases because of global warming has added a new threat.  Because most of the region is on average only a few meters above sea level and because any increase of sea level will change the complex relationship between tides and down-river water flow, the Mekong Delta is one of the areas in the world most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.  How governmental policy and resident populations have in the past and will in coming decades adapt to climate change as well as several other emerging or ongoing environmental and economic problems is the focus of this collection. Introduction by Mart A. Stewart and Peter A. CoclanisI Environmental Change in the Mekong Delta – Actions and Agencies 1. Think Global, Act Global, in the Mekong Delta? Environmental Change, Civil Society and NGOs from the Inside Looking Out. 2. Fixing the Delta: History and the Politics of Hydraulic InfrastructureDevelopment and Conservation in the Mekong Delta 3. A History of Hydraulic Environmental Management in the Red River Delta before the Colonial Intervention. 4.’A Kind of Mylai ..Against the Indochinese Countryside’: American Scientists, Herbicides, and South Vietnamese Mangrove Forests. 5. The Politics and Culture of ‘Climate Change’: U.S. Actors and Global Implications. II Social and Economic Dynamics 6. Precarious Paddies:  The Uncertain, Unstable, and Insecure Lives of Rice Farmers in the Mekong Delta. 7. Analysis of Labor Migration Flows in the Mekong Delta of Viet Nam. 8. Dynamic resilience of peri-urban agriculture in the Mekong Delta under pressures of socio-economic transformation and climate change. 9. Economic and efficiency analysis of selected farming patterns: the case of irrigated systems in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. 10. Evaluation of Living with Flood Policy: The Case of the Resettlement Program in the Mekong Delta.  III  Consequences of Environmental Change 11. Climate Change in the Mekong River Delta and Key Concerns about Future Climate Threats. 12. Climate Change Adaptation and Agrichemicals in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. 13. Roles of Men and Women in Disaster Risk Management: A Case Study of a Flood-Prone Village along the Mekong River of Cambodia. IV Human Responses to Environmental Change 14. Community-based fish culture – a viable coping strategy for farmers in the Mekong Delta? 15. From rice to shrimp: Ecological changes and human adaptation in the Mekong Delta. 16. Relationship quality in Pangasius value chains: The case of buyer – supplier management in the Mekong River Delta, Vietnam. 17. The relationship between natural conditions and the formation and development of clam grounds  (Metrix lyrata)  in the Mekong Delta. 18. Compost potential from solid waste toward sustainable agriculture and the mitigation of global warming in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. 19. Biogas Production of Pig Manure with Water Hyacinth Juice from Batch Anaerobic Digestion. 20. Community scale wind powered desalination for selected coastal Mekong provinces in Vietnam. 21. Promotion of organic cocoa in mixed farming system in the Mekong Delta region: a preliminary analysis. 22. The Transition from Conventional to Organic Rice Production in Northeastern Thailand: Prospect and Challenges. 23. Mekong Delta Rice and Aquaculture Production and Climate Variability: Coping and Adaptation Strategies.