Agriculture and fishing

Life’s hard for the salt farming communities in the far south of Ayeyarwady Region, where services are basic, food is scarce and debt is never-ending. It’s a 90-minute motorbike journey south from the Ayeyarwady delta town of Labutta before you get the first glimpses of the ...

Changes in river morphology including floods, erosion, and landslides are affecting ecosystem habitats and the lives and livelihoods of communities living along Myanmar’s rivers. SERVIR-Mekong is using satellite-based monitoring tools to support Myanmar agencies and communities to manage the risks better. Last year in Myanmar, floods ...

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 ...

Illegal fishing is a security threat, ecological emergency and human rights crisis, but it can be stopped by 2020, according to the Friends of Ocean Action a public-private partnership involving a group of more than 50 global leaders who are fast-tracking solutions to the most ...

Thailand’s crackdown on exploitation and slavery in its multi-billion dollar fishing industry will only succeed if its neighbours step up and adopt anti-trafficking laws, said a labour rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee. Thai fishing vessels are increasingly registering in nearby countries to avoid scrutiny ...

The agriculture sector at the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam must transform to enhance its adaptation capacity against climate change impacts. A master plan grounded in the context of climate change in the Mekong River Delta (MRD) is required to facilitate agricultural transformation. This is applicable ...

A Chinese-backed firm is growing bananas on land promised by the government of Laos as compensation to survivors of a 2018 dam collapse that that has been described as the country’s worst flooding in decades, RFA’s Lao Service has learned. The disaster occurred last July, when ...

Droughts are slow-onset disasters that trigger significant environmental impacts, including loss in agricultural productivity across the globe. The Lower Mekong region is no exception. Recently, Vietnam has been contending with droughts and resulting damages, especially in 2015 when it suffered heavy losses, especially in rice ...

While the entire society was still in dreaming of being a rice export power, farmers were realistic, realizing that the higher the yield of rice, the lower profit they would get because of higher fertilizer and pesticide costs. Rice farmers in the Mekong Delta now live ...

Vietnam culled more than 1.7 million pigs as African swine fever spread across the country, with officials warning the disease may penetrate sizable commercial farms next. About 5% of the nation’s pig population has been culled as the number of infected provinces and cities increased to ...