Facing the urban tide

For farmers who cultivate land on city fringes, urban growth poses some difficult questions. Should they convert from staple crops to high-value perishables for the urban market? Will their land be targeted by developers, and if so, is it worth investing in intensive land and water management? Would they be better to leave it fallow and wait and see what happens? The range of options and decisions generates incongruous contrasts of productivity and idleness wherever town and country meet. Hanoi, Vietnam's capital and second largest city, is no exception. Featured in the latest volume of IIED's 'Environment and urbanization' series, the city clearly illustrates the complexities that can arise for both farming communities and urban planners when cities grow.

Unequal opportunities

The experience of communities surrounding Hanoi is however, far from uniform. On the north-west side of the city, urban development has been done in some style. Suburbs such as Phu Tuong, reputed locally for their 'flower villages' have become the target for high-class housing projects, embassies, hotels and expensive office developments. Where farmers are displaced, compensation is relatively generous, and for the city authorities who convert the land into building plots, the rewards are considerably higher. Experiences in the southern suburbs are very different. In the last ten years the district of Thanh Tri has lost more agricultural land than any other in Hanoi province, but the land has been used for low-cost housing and heavy industry, with much less generous compensation for farmers. The reason for the disparity? Thanh Tri lies on three rivers, de facto drains for Hanoi's homes and factories.

While the pungent riverborne cargo has had a negative effect on land values, for Thanh Tri's farmers it does have some advantages. The district's vegetable plots, fed by wastewater rich in nutrients, yield an estimated 8,700 kg per hectare more than the average plot in Hanoi province. With vegetables fetching up to 30 times the value of rice per hectare, it is hardly surprising that the loss of land to urban development has been accompanied by a change in cropping; vegetables, most commonly cabbage and kohlrabi, have now displaced rice on around 17% of cultivated land in the district. The change has, of course, demanded a much more labour-intensive type of farming; it has been estimated that during the three months of most intense crop management, a household needs to invest 855 working days for each hectare of cabbage grown. This usually means hiring labour from rice-growing areas further from the city, thereby reducing profits. In Hanoi's markets, farmers' profits are also being hit by over-production, with many more growers able to reach urban consumers thanks to an improving road network.

As well as reducing the area of farmed land, the encroachment of non-porous roads and buildings has also increased the problem of flooding in Thanh Tri. Close to the city edge, fields near the Song Hong - the Red River - have now become permanent ponds; further from the city the flooding is only seasonal, but has meant that rainy season rice cultivation has had to be abandoned. Around 400 families are now farming fish and shrimp in these flooded fields and ponds, with riverborne waste supplying most of the nutrient needs. Some have also started cultivating waterborne vegetables, and water hyacinth is regularly harvested for animal feed and compost. However the flooded land has also begun to attract the attention of the city development agency. With field structures such as dykes and ditches largely washed away or smothered by sediment, it is relatively easy, using dredged sand from the river as landfill, to create an ideal building surface for large-scale development. It is possible that the coming years will see a progression of flooding and fish farming, followed by landfill and building, along the course of the Song Hong. The pressure on farmland and livelihoods is clearly not going to ease.

Lost land, lost livelihood

Compensating farmers for lost land-use rights and crops has proved only partially effective in replacing lost livelihoods. Rather than paying farmers in kind, with rights to farmland in other parts of the district, lump sum cash payments are made, intended to finance retraining and job seeking. Some have made good use of the money, investing in urban enterprises, or even buying use rights to other areas of land that may soon yield further compensation. Many families however, are unsure what to do with the money they receive. They tend to have had little formal education, and are unable to benefit from training courses on offer. Typically they spend their money on consumables but, having lost their source of income, quickly become destitute. This has led to animosity between farming communities and urban authorities, with some unfortunate consequences. Farmers in Thanh Tri, for example, are largely aware that levels of contamination in their vegetables and fish can be dangerously high, especially if they have been grown in unsettled floodwater, but the health risks to their urban customers are generally ignored. A researcher who challenged farmers in the district on the contamination levels was told, "They don't care about us, and fool us with useless compensation, so why not take some form of revenge?"

This uneasy relationship between threatened farming communities, city planners and consumers is a typical feature of the 'peri-urban interface'. These areas are shifting and complex, and the threats and opportunities they generate can vary even within a single city, as the upstream and downstream communities of Hanoi illustrate. For urban development agencies and agricultural ministries, this makes the task of legislation and planning extremely difficult. Nonetheless, it is clear from areas like Thanh Tri that if ways to protect the livelihoods of the peri-urban poor are not found, they will be the ones most likely to go under, in the tide of urban development.

Based on information from 'The transformation of agriculture and rural life downstream of Hanoi' by van den Berg, van Wijk and Van Hoi, in Environment and Urbanization vol.15.