Eco-tourism, Red river delta
9/12/2011 2:29:00 PM
Despite the grey cold winter, flocks of birds flapped their wings, appearing and disappearing amidst the tree line of Xuan Thuy National Park.
(MCD)
Sixty-year old Nguyen Van seems to agree as she welcomes visitors to her home with a smile that matches her colorful, checked headscarf and brightens the grey winter mid-morning. She has lived in this house in Giao Xuan, in the northern province of Nam Dinh, for as long as she can remember, and her parents too, long before she was born.
Van and her husband opened their house to visitors in 2006, as part of efforts to try out the idea of community-based eco-tourism (CBET) among villagers living in the 8,000-hectare buffer zone of the national park. Initiated by the Vietnamese organization, Center for Marine-life Conservation and Community Development (MCD), it forms part of a wider project partly funded by EU and Oxfam to introduce sustainable livelihood skills that also promote conservation efforts in the area.
Visitors hosted by home-stay arrangements like Van’s get to enjoy Vietnamese living in traditional homes that are becoming as rare as the Red River Delta’s waterfowls. She remembered a dozen other houses like hers in the village, but now only a few are left as most of them have been rebuilt in more modern styles. Van’s main house sits on a brick base raised nearly two feet off the ground and faces a garden separated from the yard by a low brick fence. A row of wooden doors opening into the main room forms an L shape with the kitchen and frames a spotless spacious courtyard. An old Northern traditional wooden rice hand-mill fills the space between the two buildings.
The house had been quiet and empty for some time with Van’s six children all grown and living in the nearby village or further away in Ha Noi and Ho Chi Minh, but now it is buzzing with life again, as homestay continue to charm visitors, both local and foreign. Some pass through Giao Xuan on their way to Xuan Thuy for an insight look into Vietnam’s first Ramsar site – a wetland of international importance – and for front row seats to some of the best bird-watching place in the world. Others simply want to experience rural life in the buffer zone, which Giao Xuan shares with four other communes.
The eco-tourism project participated in by the village home-stays came at a time of increasing pressure on the park’s resources, leading to biodiversity and habitat loss. Aquaculture in the buffer zone, specifically clam farming, was also on the rise, adding to the damage already sustained from overfishing, the clearing of mangroves and other economic-related human activity.
Though rice-growing and livestock-raising activities remain standard activities today, the popularity of clam production has pursued its upward trend. The locals do not call clam farming as “super-profit aquaculture” for nothing. On average, clam farming can bring in as much as 600 million dong (US$30,000) per hectare per year or 30 times the profit from rice production.
In comparison, Tran Thi Len earns no higher than seven to eight million dong (US$350-400) per year from planting rice. To increase yield, she borrowed three more sào (360 sq. m. per sào) to add to the 4.4 sào that her family of four is already entitled (or 1.2 sào per person). Though the rice produced on her total of just over a quarter of a hectare does not reach half of what she needs to support her daughter in university.
Clam farming, however, is not always all gain, especially with today’s unpredictable climate changes. Different types of clam require different farming periods, with some reaching one-and-a-half years before they can be harvested. The longer the farming period, the greater the risk clam farmers face. In May 2010, a prolonged drought and heat wave increased salt levels in the seawater of the mudflat areas. All fields reported 20 to 80 percent clam loss.
Small-scale fishers like Bui Thi Luot, 32, benefit even less from clam farming. Luot’s husband has been working as a builder in Ha Noi for the past 10 years, leaving their two children, the farming and everything else in her care. Last year, she and several other families sunk their savings into clams, and borrowed more to increase their investment, but things did not work out well. Due to bad weather, theft and tensions amongst new investors, they lost everything. Now both Luot, 32, and her husband have to work harder to pay for the debt.
With the number of clam-farming families doubling from 2000 to 2007, the water resource for clam production also increased from 370 ha to 560 ha over the same period and further shrunk space for small-scale fishers. They have instead relied on being hired as clam watchers to keep thieves away. This job employs only men, who set up makeshift tents on stilts in each clam field where they camp out the whole day. Women thus take on all other tasks left at home, joining only when they are called to harvest clams at any time of day and in hot or cold weather.
Aquaculture’s increased pressure on conservation efforts in the national park prompted MCD to pilot community-based eco-tourism as an alternative livelihood for the villagers, especially the women, who directly depend on the delta’s natural resources for food and jobs. Collaboration with local partners of Giao Xuan commune and the Xuan Thuy National Park Management Board in the CBET project also mobilized local participation, a key ingredient in sustaining wetlands management and conservation in the park.
Fifty eight-year-old Phung Thi Thin, chairperson of the Women’s Union of the commune has been managing this project since it started in 2006. “The project provided trainings to equip us with knowledge about tourism and leadership. I was also invited to take part in workshops and trainings in Ha Noi and other national conservations,” recalls Thin.
Her brick house, also a home-stay accommodation, is built in a more modern style than Van’s, but retains little touches of traditional Vietnamese homes. Thin’s main room doubles as a guestroom for visitors and is spacious enough for three double-sized beds. After putting up mosquito nets over each bed, she personally sees to the guests’ comfort, providing thickly padded cotton slippers and a portable charcoal brazier to ward off the wintery chill.
“We learn something different from each group of our visitors,” Thin continues after attending to her guests. “Their feedbacks are invaluable; we try to improve the negative and maintain the positive ones.”
Learning by doing, Thin little by little kept up with the demands of the new business, managing the reservations and supervising the sleeping and meal arrangements on top of her full time job as head of the Women’s Union.
A total of 15 households are now participating in the CBET project. Ten of them, including Thin, Van and Len’s, provide home-stay and full boarding. The rest, like Luot, work as tour guides and provide other services for visitors to the village and the national park. Word is getting around and the number of visitors is increasing year on year, from 300 in 2006 to more than 500 in 2010.
Income from the project remains modest and still considered supplementary, but villagers like Luot are reaping other rewards from their participation in CBET. “Learning many new things from the project, I feel wiser,” she said. “I love being a tour guide. It suits me.”
Luot became a tour guide after she topped a writing competition organised by the project to showcase the best of Giao Xuan. Her month-long effort in putting the piece together has been worth it; it is now the official tour route featuring Luot’s places of interest such as the the fishing port, the local market, the fish-sauce maker and several traditional houses.
When visitors arrive, Luot easily happily shifts from vendor and seafood trader, to tour guide. She looks forward to paying all her debts from the failed clam farming investment so she can expand her small seafood trading business and rebuild her house to host home-stay visitors too.
Like Luot, Len also has other sources of incomes. In addition to her rice cultivation, she shares a small shop with two other women selling rice, animal feeds and fertilisers for the locals, which bring in three to four million dong (US$150-200) a month.
“I feel more proactive since I joined the project” said Len. “I hardly had any kind of social interaction before. Whenever we saw foreigners, we would stop and stare at them, but now I host them in my own house. I don’t feel shy anymore talking with visitors from Ha Noi or Hai Phong.”
Thin is also confident of what CBET can do for other women in the village as well as the many endangered creatures sheltering in Xuan Thuy. The potential to expand the community-based ecotourism is there. Giao Xuan has the national park nearby, interesting local sites and committed local participation. “Ecotourism is sustainable and can bring good income for the locals because it does not require capital.” said Thin.
As surely as many rare birds find Xuan Thuy National Park their home for the winter, women in Giao Xuan are clearing their own path to sustainable incomes, discovering options other than clam harvesting in the delta.
Nguyen Thi Hoang Yen
Communication Officer - Oxfam in Vietnam
For the villagers of Giao Xuan who have found livelihoods that also support conservation efforts, it is more than a signal that winter is nearly ending. It is also a sign of food starting to teem again in the coastal wetlands, and of better days for small-scale women farmers and fishers in the Red River Delta.
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