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Friday, 7 September 2007

SOCIETY - fresh ideas...

Letter from Vietnam

Dear Russ:
When I saw you last in Sydney I was on my way to Viet Nam and as we had been talking about disaster and disaster planning, I thought you might like to hear about a district, Tinh Gia, in Thanh Hoa province, Viet Nam. It is a narrow coastal strip between the South China Sea and a fairly high range in a region which is regularly hit by cyclones.

Along Thanh Hoa province's 52 kilometres of coast they are hit by three to four really big cyclones each year. These occur in a region where the density of population is high, with farmers having only about 300 square metres of land to farm. In the very recent past when the run-off from the hills and the cyclones from the sea combined, many people perished. And when coastal fishermen went out, large numbers drowned. They had no warning systems.  

In the past, perhaps to after World War II, this whole 52km strip with its run-off from hills to ponds and marshes would have been buffered by thick, impenetrable jungle of bamboo and mangroves.

I remember visiting the district in the early 90s on one strange afternoon when the fishermen were getting ready to go out at night, hugging the coast in small, picturesque boats and without any warning or radar equipment at all.  The boats all had eyes to deter evil spirits and were hand crafted and covered with pitch.

That night, a tropical downpour and high winds set in. The electricity was cut and I lay under my mosquito net jumping every time the huge flashes of lightning and instant thunders crashed around the small building. The water poured off the hills and ran towards the sea, washing across the farmers' lands to cut the north-south highway.

Next morning we heard that 18 men and boys had drowned from this violent storm which had appeared without warning. At lunch time I saw 18 coffins in a row on the beach.

The cyclonic winds blew away the farmers and fisher families leaf houses and washed about one metre of beach sand across the rice fields, leaving brackish waters. Later, the sand was removed by hand.

Life there was truly awful.

My recent journey

So… to get back to this trip. We were at dinner with the Tinh Gia People’s Committee and they mentioned that they had 52km of inalienable coastal forests. I asked what it was and they explained.

Coastal forests of mixed species are planted 100-150 metres deep from the tidal zone. Permanent trees such as coconut, bamboo, mangrove and mango extend from the coastal dunes inland to the rice fields. Species selection is influenced by the brackish water.

It may be coincidence, but when I was there in early 90s I pointed out that nature would have coped with the tropical storms and cyclones by growing a dense, littoral forest which would buffet the water coming off the mountains and that brought by cyclones.

That isn’t all. Together with the coastal forest a plan for disaster avoidance has been developed.  It has short term and long term plans.    

Short term

Once there is a whisper of an approaching storm or cyclone a message is passed on by on loud speakers and travels along the coast in this way. Something like 39,000 people can be moved to higher land in a matter of hours. If there is time the dunes will be sandbagged.

The system to identify and track everyone – child to elderly - is by one-responsible-for-one and doubling up so they are linked to a second group. People have rice, blankets, lights and other essentials ready to go.

Long Term

Planting is continuous and if trees die or others found which can support the difficult conditions, they are added.

People are allowed to take small twigs for wood for stoves and fruits but not cut the trees and they work together in groups to maintain their part of the windbreak. Rice farms are being changed to more resistant species.

When I got back to Ha Noi there was a severe cyclone. Its movements were broadcast every hour on national radio. My colleagues told me, “We mustn't go down there because we would be in the way. Their emergency plans are so finely tuned that everyone know exactly what to do. We cant help”.

The cyclone came and went with no casualties and life went on as usual. There were no calls for national or international aid or assistance of any type from anywhere else.

Family farms

As you know Russ, Viet Nam dedicated all its land during the war with the US and afterwards to feeding its people with rice.

To do this, much marginal land on hills and coastal areas like those described above was brought into rice production at almost any cost. Viet Nam became the second biggest rice exporter in the world but it was at a cost of droughts, floods, forcible terracing of land and many failures. Before this the French had taken over the land of farmers and turned the farmers into day labourers, mainly on plantations. And then collectivisation was responsible for the loss of knowledge of fish farming and small scale food farming which had evolved over thousands of years.

Today, the government has revised its agricultural policy and all farmers in all areas are being told to find more appropriate crops, preferably permanent and diverse, for their lands. So, in future, Tinh Gia will not grow rice but will find other crops suitable for that cyclone-prone land.

Farmers are also being instructed to implement a policy of crop diversity on their farms and government advisers are assisting with possibilities, however farmers are cautioned against too many species.

The third prong of this agricultural policy is one of family farms, which we would understand as Permaculture farms. Farmers are being supported and helped in many provinces to develop diverse, well designed and permanent crops and there is great interest in their ability to endure climate change.

In some places the 'family farm' isn’t really possible because the French left a legacy of dividing land among all the children in a family and, so, original farms were split up into more and more smaller pieces. Some families have only 13 tiny plots and these are too small to make family farms. You can also imagine how much of a day it takes to move around your seven tiny plots dotted all over the landscape for kilometres.

It’s a huge job to reverse these land divisions so that one piece of land would big enough to be economic.

I remember being in France, in Brittany, when this was being done. All the farmers gathered in the local café on Saturday nights with coloured pencils and maps and shouted at each other until dawn while they swapped land to increase the size of single farms. A country must be ready for this, I think. So these tiny allotments remain problematic for almost any sort of commercial, sustainable farming and even for doing Permaculture. 

Warmly and in the rain,
Rowe