RiSaWa

"Assessing the social benefits accruing from preserving traditional rice production in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta"

Subproject 3 within the interdisciplinary German-Vietnamese research project "Rice production caught between salinity and drought – future options for sustainable use of water in the Mekong Delta region (RiSaWa)" (BMBF, funding code: 031B0724), 2019-2022. Link to the website.

If farmers in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) continue their current rice production practices it will lead to a further salinization of the water in the rice fields. Consequently, sooner or later rice farmers will switch to other agricultural products like e.g. shrimps. This would impair the provision of several ecosystem services (ESS) accruing from rice fields. Therefore, firstly, the provisioning ESS "rice production" would decrease dramatically in the Delta endangering food security for the Vietnamese population. Secondly, as a supporting ESS, rice fields provide habitat for a great variety of plant and animal species. Converting rice fields into shrimp farms would lead to a loss in biodiversity. Thirdly, the landscape in the VMD would change fundamentally and, fourthly, with their ancestral livelihood the traditional way of living of the people in the VMD that has existed there over centuries would be impaired. It is especially these last two cultural ESS, i.e. change of landscape beauty and lifestyle, which are of interest for our planned research in WP3 since they would harm the cultural heritage of the VMD.

If government wants to avoid this impending loss of ESS it has to set up new water management strategies and agricultural techniques, which would make rice production in the VMD more sustainable and more profitable for farmers. Since such measures would be costly and since there are many alternative projects on which public money could be spent government has to decide if a policy for the conservation of the traditional rice production (TRARIPRO) in the Mekong delta would be worthwhile realizing. Such a decision is typically based on a comparison between the social costs and the social benefits accruing from such a public project, i.e. the social benefits should at least cover the social cost. The cost of such projects typically consists of the cost of labor, capital and materials, all of which are traded in markets so that they can be valued at market prices. Things are different for most of the social benefits accruing from public projects like TRARIPRO, since they consist to a great part of ESS, which are not traded in markets, so that no market prices exist for their valuation. While provisioning services like rice harvests are traded in markets, this is not the case for supporting and cultural ESS. Hence, for their assessment special valuation methods like the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) or Choice Experiments have to be employed. In subproject 3 a CVM study will be conducted in the Mekong Delta and also in Hanoi in order to obtain a more precise picture of the social benefits accruing from TRARIPRO in the VMD. An important methodological goal of subproject 3 is the enhancement of the validity and reliability of CVM studies against the cultural backdrop of Vietnam.