Presenter: Dr Nguyen Quang

Time: 10:30 AM (Vietnam), Thursday 30th June 2022

Location: Room B1-1001, 279 Nguyen Tri Phuong St, Ward 5, Dist 10, HCMC

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During recent decades, mangroves in the Mekong River Delta (MRD) have sharply reduced due to activities such as deforestation and shrimp farming. Lately, there have been efforts to restore mangroves in this region, but their effects were uneven. Mangroves proliferated in some communities while others were left with very small areas. These changes may have an impact on local fishery activities. In this paper, we use the production function integrating mangrove ecosystem services to analyze the impacts of mangrove forests on the near-shore fishery of local communities in the MRD. Our estimation reveals that mangrove forest areas increase harvests of local near-shore fishery and that it improves the marginal productivity of inputs such as vessel and labor. This implies mangrove forests are beneficial to both wealthier fishermen, who afford to invest in larger and more expensive vessels and poorer ones who make use of more labor. On the other hand, the clearance of mangrove forests in MRD may harm the livelihood of poor fishermen. The results imply that reforestation policies that increase mangrove forest areas across communities are more beneficial to local livelihoods than those with uneven impacts.

Keywords: bio-economics, fishery production function, mangrove.
 

About presenter:

Dr Nguyen Quang:
Dr Nguyen Quang is a lecturer in the School of Economics at the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City and a research fellow at EfD-Vietnam, an environmental economics research centre of the Environment for Development (EfD) network. He completed his PhD at the Graduate School of Environmental and Life Science, Okayama University, Japan. His research interests include rural transition, agriculture and environmental problems. His current work focuses on livelihood and land-use change in peri-urban areas and the evaluation of wetland ecosystems in Vietnam.