A highlight of our visit to Ho Chi Minh City was a day visit to the Mekong Delta. The Mekong Delta is one of the largest wetlands in Asia, and sustains a wide diversity of 450 species of fish, according to the World Wildlife Federation. The Mekong Delta also supports an abundance of rich agricultural activity, including rice cultivation. We boarded a boat to ford the Mekong River to visit one of its small island communities. Many rural and mountainous communities in Vietnam are economically disadvantaged and as a result, adults and children will migrate to cities to seek jobs. We’ve learned in visits with local NGOs that this poverty also creates opportunities for human traffickers to operate, leading to children and adults to “disappear” from their towns.
Here in the Mekong Delta, small island villages are showcasing their cultural traditions, lifestyle, and selling locally produced goods to tourists, generating additional revenue that helps sustain their communities. In this way, these island communities have effectively used their proximity to a major Vietnamese city - Saigon - to attract tourists and boost their own local economies and resilience in an environment that principally concentrates income in urban areas.
During our visit to the islands in Mekong Delta, we had the opportunity to sample fresh tropical fruits and honey from a local bee-keeping farm while enjoying traditional Vietnamese folk music performed by local residents. We boarded small canoes called sampans to journey through narrow, palm-lined canals. As we traveled these canals, we observed the many communities along the canal banks, and locals frequently paddled by us in their own sampams. Our hosts showed us how they craft candy from coconuts growing throughout the river delta. Two members of our group tried their hand at frying Vietnamese pancakes, made from rice flour, turmeric, coconut milk, and topped with cocktail shrimp and spring onion. We were fortunate to sample many local Vietnamese delicacies for lunch, including elephant ear fish (native to the Mekong Delta), a tomato-based tofu stew, bok choy and morning glory (water spinach).
In our time on the Mekong Delta, I was struck by the parallels with similar rural and indigenous communities I previously visited in Costa Rica. These agrarian communities around Tortuguero National Park and the BriBri reservation similarly embraced small-scale eco-tourism to sustain their way of life and provide a more secure livelihood for their communities. In a globally connected economy, there are tremendous challenges for small scale farming communities to prosper - be it from competition by large plantations owned by multinational corporations, volatile commodity pricing, pestilence (e.g. fungi destroying the cacao crop), to minimal government investment and infrastructure. Tourist revenue often concentrates in cities and coastal resort areas. Both in Costa Rica and Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, these vulnerable rural communities learned how to attract and wield tourism as a tool to guard against the disintegration of community and cultural ties in rural areas.
As we continue to learn more about the network of Vietnamese government and NGO support for child victims of human trafficking, today’s excursion highlighted the importance of developing and expanding economic opportunities for rural Vietnamese communities to provide a viable and durable alternative to the human trafficking market.
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