But for those who stay, their lives on the Mekong revolve around the river, and many villages are only accessible by rivers and canals and not roads. During the initial French Colonization of Indochina (present day Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand) the Mekong Delta was seen as having a dearth of reliable roads. The French mostly interested in maintaining control and exploiting profits from the land (and water), only saw the current land infrastructure as having predictable choke points at bridges and stoppages at the numerous creeks, streams, rivers and canals.

Furthermore, frequent monsoon conditions restricted operations and ground conditions were often muddy (horrible for troop movement). As a result of these military and economic needs, the French and Vietnamese built a comprehensive hydrological infrastructure. From 1890 to 1936, 1360 kilometers of main canals and 2500 kilometers of auxiliary canals were dug by a combined effort of machines and manual labor (New Geographies 4: Scales of the Earth). With the increasing mobility provided by the canals and with the paralleling development of a more comprehensive irrigation system, the Mekong Delta region went from 552,000 hectares of cultivated area in 1880 to 2,200,000 hectares in 1936 (Fantz: Mekong Treasure Trove).

The French’s modern technology and non-native rationality brought a market-driven economy to the region, and altered the centuries-old way of production and nature of the territory. The new infrastructure system actually agitated the natural systems and brought about traumatic change and created a complete rupture with the traditional Vietnamese society. The previous system worked more though a process of slow adaption to circumstances, where flood protection and salinity intrusion controls were paramount in determining hydraulic work. The new French infrastructure of canals and dykes bulldozed though everything and disregarded the natural flows of the oceans, rivers and flooding waters. But when the Indochina war end in 1949 and the American War ended in 1975, the remnants of the occupiers’ interventions were utilized as circulation infrastructure and acted as an economic driver for production and settlement of the area. There started to be a new push towards industrialization and capitalist markets based on the production and consumption of goods (Clift, Plumb).

On the Mekong delta, where urban settlements had been sparse and widely designated as rural, the French planned canals were adapt into new grounds for urbanization and routes for food distribution. The local villagers and farmers use the canals in combinations with the rivers to create a robust food distribution network that goes from their local fields to the super markets in the urban cities and even shipped out on cargo container ships to the international trade scene (Mekong River Commission). The flow of food starts in the farms and fields of the local villagers. They are all very advantageous and adaptable and grow anything from rice to tea: various vegetables and fruits and livestock. They grow them for their daily consumption as well as to sell. The irrigation system makes the separation of salt from fresh water possible and they use the man-made and natural canals as transport: mostly of the exclusively.

The canals and waterways also act as the area of commerce where the selling and trading occur. The exchange arenas are called floating markets. In these markets on the water, the local villager is able to barter his goods to the general market goer or to sell in bulk to wholesalers. In turn, wholesalers transport these large amounts of goods into one of many urbanized areas of the delta or the Southeast Asia region on the canal system where the foods are sold in supermarkets. The wholesalers also came from larger corporations who then take the food to shipping ports where they are shipped internationally as Vietnamese exports. One of the main commodities is coming out of Vietnam is rice where Vietnam is the number two exporter of rice, behind Thailand and more than Japan and Korea combined. Vietnam is the number two exporter in coffee behind Brazil (Thi Dieu Nguyen). These canal systems are more resilient as circulation infrastructure than land roads in the Mekong Delta in that they can respond to the differentiating water levels. Approximately 55-65 percent of the Mekong Delta floods with water level rises 1-2 meters and approximately 75-85 percent of the Mekong is submerged with a 3-6 meter water rise (Sarkkula, Keskinen, Koponen). This water intrusion, coupled with the saline intrusion will deteriorate the possibility for agricultural production and the main method of substance in the Mekong will be drastically altered. (Salkin, Robert, Asia and Oceania).

Please email to request full article.