by Piyaporn Hawiset
29 October 2002
More than 250 delegates from foreign countries and international and non-governmental organisations and Vietnam gathered for a three-day international conference on water, which opened in Hanoi on October 14, 2002. The conference, themed Water, Food and Environment Dialogue, aimed make preparations for the Earth Summit and the third world water forum to be held in 2003. It also provided foreign and Vietnamese delegates with an opportunity to discuss ways to increase effective management and use of water sources to ensure food security, environmental protection and improvement of life quality.
Vietnam depends heavily on agriculture so water supply is of crucial importance. Vietnam now had 8,265 irrigation projects, including 743 large and medium sized reservoirs and thousands of smaller ones, which have a total value of VND 100,000 billion (US $6.5 billion), according to a report delivered at the meeting.
Irrigation, together with new farming techniques and seed selection, has helped Vietnam not only ensure food security but also become a major rice exporter in the world, the report stressed, adding that irrigation projects had also helped reduce poverty in rural areas.
Yet, like many other countries in the region and throughout the world, Vietnam was now facing challenges in management and utilisation of water sources against the backdrop of its population boom and urbanisation process, which had raised the demand for water for daily use and production.
Upgraded irrigation, cleaner water key to feeding a growing population
At the seminar commemorating World Food Day, experts from the University of Water Resources in Hanoi discussed the status and future needs of water irrigation and sanitation in Vietnam. Addressing the seminar, University Rector Le Kim Truyen said that after many years of investing in irrigation, Vietnam now ran 75 large and medium-scale irrigation systems and many small ones, valued at around VND6 trillion (US$309 million). And although these systems had watered more than 3.3 million hectares of cultivated land and desalinated 700,000 ha of land in the Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta, Truyen said that water shortages and dirty sewage water still posed problems for Vietnam.
In the previous few years, efforts to stay the damage caused by natural calamities--the contamination and shortages they brought in their wake--included reinforcing river embankments and building a reservoir systems with a capacity of more than 25 billion m3.
According to participants in the workshop, which was co-sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Government had made having a skilled workforce a priority in planning water projects. As a result, over the previous 43 years, the University of Water Resources had begun updating the technology in irrigation works, locally manufacturing some of the equipment used. For one, canals had been lined with concrete in regions such as the Tay Nguyen (Central Highlands) and Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta.
Coping with the challenges of water shortage, according to Truyen, Vietnam had to further upgrade the existing irrigation system and invest in building more canals, in addition to developing a control and treatment system for waste water.
The conference lasted until October 16.