The Decibel - What we’re getting wrong about climate refugees

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Vietnam is in the midst of a dramatic shift caused by climate change. Some of the country’s most fertile land along the Mekong Delta has been devastated by flooding from rising ocean levels.Doug Saunders, a columnist at The Globe, is on the show today to talk about climate migration in Vietnam and what really happens when climate change forces someone from their home.This episode is part two of Undercurrents – The Globe’s year-long series devoted to the global migration crisis. You can find part one here.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

So we're on a small boat, basically a large canoe, on the Mekong River shortly before dawn, about 5.30 a.m. Doug Saunders is the Globe and Mail's international affairs columnist. The moon is out and the river is almost glassy still. There's not a lot of boats on it. And we're putting down toward a bunch of lights in the distance, just south of Kanto, the major city on the Mekong River in the Mekong Delta region. And you start hearing a lot of shouting and activity from the boats. And then you see that they're laden with loads of vegetables and fruit and rice and seafood and meat.

And this is a floating farmer's market that's gone on for many, many decades, where the farmers have traditionally brought their produce to sell to wholesalers and market keepers and shopkeepers and so on at dawn. Doug is at a floating market called Kaizang. Traveling by boat used to be the primary way people would get around this part of Vietnam, thanks to the country's vast web of rivers and canals. If you visited this market at dawn five years ago or ten years ago, there would have been hundreds of boats selling produce. It would have been much more extensive,

and it was a central economic part of the Mekong Delta region. But in the last few years, and particularly in the post-pandemic years, it's declined dramatically. There are far fewer farmers coming through the canals to sell their produce at these markets. Doug was in Vietnam to see how climate change has affected the way people work and where they live. It's no longer a farmer's market in quite the same way that it used to be because you can't bring things to market in the way that you used to. And farming does not happen in the Mekong Delta the way that it used to.

This is the second part of Undercurrents, Doug's year-long series devoted to the global migration crisis. On this trip to Vietnam, he explored a common misunderstanding of climate refugees and what actually happens instead. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Doug, thanks so much for being here again. A real pleasure. So, Doug, you traveled to Vietnam to look into the idea of climate migration. But I think in order to really understand what you learned about that,

which is quite interesting, I think we really need to back up a little bit and start with what you saw when you were there. So let's begin with a central character in the story that you tell here, Doug, which is the Mekong Delta itself. What is the role in the lives of the people who live along this river? So the Mekong Delta is one of the most fertile places on earth. It's where the enormous Mekong River, after snaking through China and Cambodia,

enters Vietnam and breaks up into nine branches of the river across a very low-lying area that has traditionally grown a lot of rice as well as fruit and shrimp farming and things like this. And the life in the agricultural villages of the Mekong Delta is very tranquil. It's very easy. It's very cheap. You pick fruit off the trees. Everything grows even amidst environmental devastation.

It's a very fertile area that's very nice to live in. And the whole Mekong Delta is less than a meter above sea level on average, which makes it, like a lot of coastal agricultural areas around the world, highly vulnerable to environmental damage caused by climate change, or at least by environmental effects that could be linked to climate change, such as saltwater influx and flooding and more frequent droughts and dry seasons and so on. Can you just really kind of really connect the dots for me here? So when we talk about the effects of climate change, you mentioned saltwater. What's exactly happening here? Rice farming requires you to flood paddies with fresh water and then tend them for about three months. You can get three crops a year if you're

a very successful farmer and you don't mind exhausting the soil a little bit. And it's highly vulnerable to saltwater flooding because the saltwaters from the South China Sea, which the Mekong feeds into, can overwhelm the canals and flood inward, flooding the paddies and sugarcane plantations and other such things with saltwater that basically ruins a crop. And when you said it's only like a meter above sea level, this is why it's so vulnerable then. So it's really easy for it to flood this way. Yeah. The Mekong River has been dammed for hydroelectricity upstream by both Cambodia and China. And that means that the silt that used to come through the river now is blocked by those hydro dams.

So you get erosion of the coastal mangrove areas. So it's feeling the effects of rising sea levels earlier than some places will because it has those erosion effects causing it. So it's almost like a preview of what's going to happen as sea levels rise, as well as some effects caused by the actual rising of sea levels. Okay. So we've got this really fertile land here that's basically being flooded with saltwater, which makes it untenable really for this kind of farming. So let's talk about how that's caused changes in recent years then, Doug. What's been happening to the people who are living there, living in small villages along the delta, along the edges of the river? How have their lives been changed?

What we found in the rice farming and sugarcane farming villages that we visited was that the saltwater floods, as well as more frequent droughts and dry seasons, were causing crop failures, sometimes two out of three crops a year for some unlucky farmers, all their crops for a couple of years. And this was throwing families into debt. And in order to repay that debt or to get out of ruination, they would generally sell or get rid of their fields, which may have been infertile by then anyway. And they would go to the city to do factory work, to earn a factory income. How many people are we talking about here who actually make that kind of move? At least a million farmers have left their villages to go to either Kanto, the major city of the Mekong Delta, which has factories around its outskirts, or more especially to Ho Chi Minh City, where there's huge factory districts to the north.

And almost all of the factory workers and the construction workers on building sites in Ho Chi Minh City are former rice farmers from the Mekong Delta. In fact, the sort of slums those factory workers live in are often known as Mekong Delta hamlets. Wow. And the remaining population in the Mekong Delta is about 17 million, I think, right? So one million out of that is actually fairly substantial. So can you tell me about someone who you met who's in this situation of, you know, having been a rice farmer and now has had to move to the city for work? We spend a lot of time with one extended family who are divided between a village in the city. The working age adult who's in the city is named Kim Huang. And he is sort of a multi-talented former rice farmer who lives in one of those

little cubes in the city with his wife, Ta, and they both work in the factory in the city five days a week, and he also cuts hair on weekends for a little bit of extra money. He runs a barber chair directly out of their one-room apartment, and that doesn't really provide them much money. They send the money back to the village, and they're able to visit their son, who's seven years old, once per year for four to five weeks. And we followed them back to the village they came from called Nuukman, whose name means saltwater historically, ironically enough. And Nukman, like many villages in the Mekong Delta, is what a lot of scholars would call a hollow village, which is to say that it's populated almost entirely with small children

and senior citizens. So the children sit in the villages in the evening, text messaging and video messaging their parents back in the factories, back and forth. And it's kind of loneliness on both sides. I think a lot of people might wonder then, if their way of life has been so disrupted by the flooding of the river and other factors that have made farming untenable,

essentially, as a way of life, I guess, why don't they move somewhere else? Like, why don't they even maybe leave Vietnam and start somewhere new? Migration is something that costs money. And that's the fundamental thing that migration scholars have known all along that climate scientists have not quite clued onto until the last few years when they've realized, as migration scholars do that if you lose your agricultural income due to climate change you're much less able to migrate even though you need to

however there's the paradox you have to migrate so maybe you go to the city to earn a little bit of extra money for a few months per year, and you remain a villager who's trapped between two different locations, not really able to permanently settle on either side. In fact, there was a big study in 2011 done in Britain by a large group of universities and scientists that found that climate change actually very often causes net migration into climate affected areas because the property prices drop and so on, which is not a healthy thing. And a lot of the policy conclusions that come from this are that because climate hinders migration among people who really need to have different

livings in different places, maybe we should be creating climate migration. Maybe we should be creating concepts of resettlement, migration, and visas that allow us to resettle climate-affected people, because climate migration might not happen unless we actually make it happen. We'll be back in a minute. Okay, Doug, this is a very interesting point here because I think this idea that as we see more and more effects of climate change, you know, bigger storms, wildfires, more flooding, there's this idea that we're going to see more and more people being forced into migration. This is kind of the way we think about it. We often hear the term climate migrants, climate refugees, but you're saying that's not actually the case. So I guess what's going to happen to the people who are feeling the effects of climate change, but can't leave where they live?

What's their situation? It's a very vulnerable situation that these people face, because climate often forces them to stay. There's a term that migration scholars use called the involuntary immobile, which is people whose circumstances, such as climate change, force them not to be able to migrate when they really should. So the term that's more often used is climate displacement, which means you get out to wherever you can that you can make a go of it. A lot of these farmers, to the extent that they are migrating, are best described as circular migrants, which is to say they seasonally or for 11 months of the year or what have you, go to the city to work. the village and they oscillate back and forth, sometimes for a long period until maybe they can establish themselves enough that the rest of their family could move to the city. But the effects of climate change make this a much more difficult transition in places like Vietnam and Bangladesh, because families like these that I'm describing are not able

to make that urban transition fully because they do not have the rural incomes anymore due to climate change to support those kinds of moves. And what would it take to get, I guess, people in that situation to a situation where they could move? So when it's citizens of a country can pack up and leave if they're experiencing the harsh realities of climate change, what does it take to get to that? There's a big gap between what countries such as Vietnam, whose farmers are affected by climate change, should be doing and what they are doing. And you could say that it's a well-meaning response that countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh have, which is to try to do things to keep people in agriculture and in villages, maybe moving people out of the most flooding and drought affected areas into new rural areas or to build big dams or to shift the crop.

And the farmers who get these government programs to move them to more sustainable agricultural areas tend to be the ones who then use that money to move more permanently to the city. Some scholars call that double displacement, in that they're displaced out of the vulnerable areas and that actually earns them enough money, because they're no longer climate affected, to become permanent migrants to the city. And it would help if governments began to recognize this, that the solution is not to try to maintain huge populations of 17 million people in agricultural

areas, but to help people make a transition to a better, more urban life in a more permanent way. So what kind of things, like what would that look like? What could the government do, essentially, to kind of make that happen? We've seen these sort of changes happen in China where manufacturing has moved away somewhat from the lowest cost manufacturing with masses of workers living in giant factory dormitories and relying on having their children

in the villages and so on. But the last 10 or 12 years as globalization has receded and manufacturing supply chains have moved back to the West has meant that a lot of Asian countries, including Vietnam, no longer necessarily need to rely on the race to the bottom in terms of wages and those sort of things. The cheapest manufacturing and garment manufacturing for Asian markets and those sort of things has moved out of more prosperous countries. Vietnam's a little bit behind other countries in that respect, partly because it has boosted an image as a low-wage manufacturer, and partly probably because its form of government isn't very responsive or fast-moving all the time,

but it's done fairly well in trying to move out of that. So there's reason to hope that this reliance on both the lowest income form of agriculture and the lowest wage form of industrial manufacturing and the cycle of loneliness and dependency that results from that will begin to recede. But again, the effects of climate change exacerbate this. They make it even trickier for families to make that transition out of the lowest end of the wage scale and of the agricultural economy. And just to end here, I want to come back to the farmer that you originally told us about, who left his village and now works in a factory and cuts hair on the side on the weekends. Kim Fong is his name. Doug, what are his plans for the future and what are his so on. He's a fairly ambitious guy who's found his life thwarted. And like many of these people who've managed to make a decent income in the city,

he's using that income to build himself a house back in the village. But you can build slowly with a factory income in the village. And he hopes sometime, probably within the next three or four years, the pandemic slowed down these ambitions a little bit for everybody to be able to move back to the village. So whatever climate change is doing to these families, it's not removing this idea that people don't always want to migrate out of somewhere, that we shouldn't assume that climate devastation is going to make people want to move out of places or even able to move out of places, that they might want to find a sustainable way to stay. Doug, this was a really interesting and important to understand things here as well.

So thank you so much for taking the time today. It was a real pleasure. Thank you. I mentioned off the top that this was the second story in Doug's series called Undercurrents. If you want to go back and listen to the first installment, look for our episode that was originally published on January 19th. It's called Inside the Life or Death Journey of One Venezuelan Family. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our intern is Andrew Hines. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.