Vietnam’s “rice bowl” delta region is predicted to run out of sand in just over a decade. — AFP
Can Tho (Vietnam): One summer morning, Le Thi Hong Mai’s home collapsed into a river in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, where shoreline erosion caused by sand mining and hydropower dams threatens hundreds of thousands of people.
Sand – needed to produce concrete – is the world’s second-most exploited natural resource after water, and its use has tripled in the last two decades, according to the United Nations environment programme.
Vietnam’s “rice bowl” delta region, where the Mekong empties into the South China Sea, is predicted to run out of sand in just over a decade.
But losses to the riverbed are already devastating lives and harming the local economy.
Mai told AFP she “lost everything”, including the small restaurant business attached to her house in the suburbs of Can Tho City.
“I heard a bang, I rushed out and everything was gone,” recalled the 46-year-old, who was sleeping close by. “I have nothing left”.
Over the past two decades, hydropower dams upstream on the Mekong have restricted the flow of sand to the delta.
And sand mining to feed Vietnam’s construction boom is also fast depleting resources, according to a major WWF report published earlier this year.
By 2040, the amount of sediment could be reduced by up to 97%, a 2018 Mekong River Commission study said, with serious consequences for people living and working on the shores of the river.
With less sand, river flows become lighter and faster and hit the banks at greater speed, accelerating erosion.
Between 2016 and August this year, at least 750km of riverbank and nearly 2,000 houses in the Mekong Delta region have sunk into rivers, government figures show.
Along the Mekong, diggers and boats work around the clock, dredging sand from the riverbed.
According to Vietnam’s Transport Ministry , the Delta region needs 54 million cubic metres of sand for six major national highways before 2025.
The river system can provide less than half, the ministry says.
Important projects have already been delayed while authorities debate alternatives, including sea sand or imports from neighbouring Cambodia.
In Can Tho, cows sit next to unmanned excavators, and sections of a road that will eventually run to Ca Mau province are still underwater – awaiting sand to cover them.
“We haven’t had enough sand since the beginning of the year, so we don’t have much to do,” one worker, who declined to give his name said.
Vietnam banned exports of sand in all forms in 2017.
But given high domestic demand, the amount dredged still exceeds what comes downstream, Mekong expert Nguyen Huu Thien explained.
At the current extraction rate of 35 million cubic metrrs to 55 million cubic metres a year, there will be no more sand by 2035, according to the WWF-led study.
“These are the last grains of sand we are dredging,” Thien warned.
In Hau Giang province, 60km from where Mai lost her home, Diep Thi Lua awoke in the middle of the night to see her front garden disappear into the water.
“We all jumped out of bed after hearing a big noise,” said the 49-year-old.
“We could feel the ground was shaking. We were so, so scared.”
She said the river had widened over the decades by dozens of metres.
Since 2016, Vietnam’s government has spent over US$470mil on 190 projects to prevent erosion in the Mekong Delta, according to state media.
But “many of these expensive structures have collapsed into the river”, Thien said.
A single US$4.7mil embankment built in 2016 was washed away three times between 2020 and 2022, state media reported.
Half the delta could be gone by the end of the century, Thein warned. — AFP
