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In Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta, debt can be deadlier than droughts

mekongeye – By Lê Đình Tuyển

20 July 2026 at 16:38 (Updated on 17 August 2026 at 17:03)

Farmers too scarred by extreme droughts and saltwater intrusion to borrow again

Nguyễn Văn Cu has chopped down his last pomelo trees and replaced them with coconuts, a salt-tolerant crop. PHOTO: Lê Đình Tuyển.

VĨNH LONG, VIET NAM – At 81, farmer Nguyễn Văn Cu has chopped down the last pomelo trees on his one-hectare orchard, which used to earn him up to US$40,000 a year.

Pomelo was his life’s work until the extreme droughts and saltwater intrusion of 2016 and 2019 decimated his fruit trees. Today, he uses the dead trunks for firewood.

Like many farmers in Lương Hòa Commune, Cu switched to coconuts, a more salt-tolerant crop. The commune has lost 97% of its orchards, and with them the reputation as Viet Nam’s citrus capital.

By 2026, more than 80% of the pomelo orchards had been converted to coconut plantations, the rest to other crops.

In Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta, farmers hit by climate disaster like Cu have access to loans, but most, especially smallholders, have either failed trying to rebuild, or avoided debt altogether.

Adapting to an increasingly unpredictable climate is critical, yet a great gamble for many delta farmers.

In Lương Hòa, only a handful of wealthy, quick-witted ones were able to survive the droughts and salinity. The rest either settled for less profitable crops, turned to wage labor, changed profession or worse, remained trapped in debt.

The typical survivor

Nguyễn Văn Cu, 81

For farmers across Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta, saltwater intrusion in the 2000s used to be a seasonal, manageable event. It was also the heyday of pomelos, when Cu’s single hectare funded all eight of his children’s studies.

Cu was among the founding members of the Giồng Trôm Green-Skin Pomelo Cooperative, which was set up in 2013.

In the first few years, business was lucrative. The cooperative secured its output with major retail chains such as VinEco, delivering 200-250 tonnes of pomelos annually. The cooperative’s “Billionaire Farmers Club,” in dong terms, had at most 36 members, who met regularly to share knowledge and support struggling households.

“It wasn’t unusual for farmers to buy several taels of gold after a good season,” Cu recalled.

The club is now almost defunct.

As saltwater slowly killed his pomelo orchard over several years, Cu was also struggling with nearly $7,600 (200 million VND) in state bank debt after borrowing to buy land for his son.

“I lay awake night after night, wondering how I would repay the loan,” said Cu.

Switching to coconuts ultimately pulled Cu out of debt, despite the meager earnings.

The debt-trapped

Đoàn Thị Mỹ Hạnh, 61

Hạnh and her family used to live comfortably on limes, pomelos and mandarins, until 2020. Her 42-year-old son, once the family’s breadwinner, was then diagnosed with last-stage chronic kidney disease.

Dialysis was expensive and Hạnh could not afford a kidney transplant. Her crops had also started to fail, so she mortgaged her 0.8 hectare to Agribank, borrowing $19,000 (500 million VND). She also took out unsecured loans worth thousands of dollars through the commune’s Women’s Union and the CEP Microfinance Institution.

“We used the loans to dredge mud onto the orchard and replanted the trees. But once the soil had become saline, no amount of rehabilitation could restore it,” she said.

After about five years, all the family’s savings were buried into the ground with the seedlings.

“We kept hoping the orchard would recover, but the more we invested, the more we lost,” Hạnh lamented.

Coconuts were not able to pull her out of debt, unlike Cu. Her plot was on low-lying land, which poorly suits the crop. Her fruit were much tinier than others’.

Hạnh cannot repay her principal of $19,000, so the family had to resort to informal lenders to roll over the bank loan.

“Whenever the principal came due, we had to take out ‘hot loans’. The interest was $60 a day for $19,000. After three days, the bank disbursed a new loan, and we used that money to pay back the [informal] lender,” Hạnh explained.

Three days of ‘hot loans’ usually cost Hạnh $180, or 4.5 million VND – a month’s pay for many delta residents. Desperate, Hạnh sold another 3,000 square meters of land for just over $11,000, enough to repay only her informal loans. The principal remains unpaid.

Now past retirement age, she still cuts grass, splits areca nuts and strips nipa palm leaves to earn a meager daily wage of $7, if she is hired.

“People in the neighborhood know we’re struggling, so they hire me whenever they can. As for the principal, honestly, I have no way to repay it anymore. I’m just taking it one day at a time,” she confessed.

The scarred pragmatist

Nguyễn Thị Vẹn, 44

Even younger farmers with less family burdens remain reluctant to borrow, after being burned by droughts and salinity.

Nguyễn Thị Vẹn, Hạnh’s neighbor, could only recover one-fifth of her original income when salinity and droughts forced her to switch to coconuts.

She pooled her savings to start a chicken farm, but her flock of 100 chickens soon died. Vẹn mortgaged her land and borrowed $11,500 (300 million VND) from Agribank. This time, she was done with farming.

Vẹn bought metalworking equipment so her husband, a skilled mechanic who had worked in Ho Chi Minh City, could put his trade to use. She used the remaining money to start a small catering business for herself.

“The bank told us we could borrow more if we wanted, but I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to repay it, so we stopped at 300 million VND,” she explained.

The couple now earns enough to live and pay off the monthly bank interest of $100. They have not repaid the principal, but unlike Hạnh, they have not had to resort to loan sharks. Instead, they ask relatives or acquaintances for a small fee.

Vẹn considers herself fortunate.

“We have to protect our credit record. If we fall into bad debt, no bank will lend to us again. We wouldn’t even be able to buy household appliances on instalment because the stores would turn us away,” she said.

The failed experimenter

Trần Văn Đời, 60

After salination hit, Đời experimented with limes before settling on coconuts.

“They [citrus trees] grew well for the first couple of years, but by the third year they started to decline. In saline areas like this, the greatest fear is the third-year debt trap,” Đời explained.

Perennial fruit trees typically take three years to produce their first harvest, so farmers finance new orchards with three-year loans, Đời said. By the time those loans mature, however, the trees’ roots have reached the salt-contaminated soil and begin to die, leaving farmers with debt.

Coconut prices are volatile and the crop brings far more modest returns. Though weary, this farmer has little appetite for another risky investment.

“At my age, I’ve decided to switch completely to coconuts because they’re more reliable. Even if prices go up and down, they still provide some income every month, and I don’t have to worry about salt water,” Đời said.

Đời and his wife cut nipa palm leaves at their neighbor Nguyễn Văn Bảy’s orchard and sell them for an extra income of about $4 (100,000 VND) a day.

The strategist

Nguyễn Văn Bảy, 63

Bảy’s five-hectare pomelo orchard is a rare exception in Lương Hòa. The cooperative director has not only survived two historic saltwater intrusion events, he even prospered.

“Farming is like playing chess,” he reasoned. “The moment you plant a seedling, the first question shouldn’t be how much fruit it will produce, but how you are going to protect it from future risks.”

In the past two decades, Bảy and his wife Thu have invested in dikes, a solar power system, salinity monitoring equipment and automated irrigation.

As early as 2015, when the cost of mud and sand was still low, Bảy and his wife took out a loan to build a sturdy dike around their orchard and raise the planting beds, creating a first line of defense against flooding and saltwater intrusion.

Building and maintaining the structure cost them nearly $200,000 over the past decade, a figure out of reach for most people in his village.

Given the delta’s current sand shortage and its sky-high price, replicating this in 2026 is nearly impossible, Bảy said.

Bảy manages his debt carefully. His credit line is roughly $76,000 (2 billion VND), but he always leaves a quarter for emergency.

“When a loan matures, I use that buffer to repay it, then borrow again,” he explained.

Bảy has also revamped his orchard, replacing a vulnerable monoculture with a more resilient intercropping system.

He says climate change has brought more than saltwater intrusion. Rising temperatures have also dried out the soil quicker than usual.

To conserve moisture, he grows pomelos, oranges and mandarins beneath the shade of coconut and palms. He also keeps earthworms to improve soil fertility and structure, and weaver ants for natural pest control in the canopy.

The diversified orchard provides a steady income. “If one crop fails, another helps make up the loss,” Bảy said. “That’s how we’ve learned to live with unpredictable weather.”

The couple have also diversified how they manage their farm. To improve soil health, Thu partners with four neighboring households, including Đời and his wife, allowing them to harvest nipa palm stalks free of charge for extra income. In return, they leave the leaves behind to be composted.

The arrangement produces more than 200 tonnes of compost each year, cutting the family’s spending on chemical fertilizers by up to 70%.

In 2021, Bảy covered 30% of the 285 million VND (about $11,000) cost of installing an automated monitoring station. The system tracks salinity levels and pest outbreaks within a 10-kilometre radius, sending real-time data directly to his phone.

Bảy shares the software with all 63 members of his cooperative.

“Thanks to this system, everyone knows when the water is too salty and when fresh water is available,” he said. “That helps farmers decide when to pump water into their orchards and irrigate their crops.”

The quick-witted farmer is already planning his next move – a farm-stay and community-based tourism business.

The involuntary transition

Once a secondary crop, coconuts are now the backbone of Lương Hòa’s farm economy. The shift, said Phan Thanh Hải, the head of the commune’s Farmers’ Association, is no longer a choice but a necessity.

For farmers and local officials, drought and saltwater intrusion are no longer seasonal events but a full-blown ecological crisis.

In 2016, the worst drought and saltwater intrusion in centuries destroyed nearly 38,800 hectares of fruit trees and caused more than VND15.7 trillion in losses. Three years later, saltwater reached 45-66 kilometers farther inland, affecting 1.68 million hectares – much wider than in 2016.

When an orchard dies, the losses go far beyond crops, often triggering a chain of economic and social fallouts.

“One of the clearest consequences is rural exodus,” said Trần Hữu Hiệp, an economist and former head of the Economic Department. “Young workers are forced to leave for cities and industrial zones to find factory jobs. A generation of children in the Mekong Delta is growing up without their parents, relying on grandparents for care. Without adequate support and education, they face an increasingly uncertain future.”

Hiệp argues that Viet Nam has long blurred the line between social welfare and economic policy.

“We try to pursue economic growth while solving social welfare at the same time, and that contradiction is reflected in rural lending,” he said. “For poor households with few assets, loans alone are not enough. Without knowledge, skills and stable jobs, they are unlikely to use credit effectively.”

Only a small share of farmers, those with market knowledge or better-educated family members, manage to succeed. Most, he said, with little market information, many farmers simply follow price trends.

When a crop becomes profitable, they rush to plant it. But when prices crash or disasters strike, many are left in debt, forced to borrow from loan sharks or sell their land.

Hiệp argues that rural lending should be based on local needs and farmers’ ability to repay, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

“It’s an extremely difficult problem to solve,” he remarked.

Over the long term, he called for a climate adaptation strategy built on three pillars: climate-resilient farming, eco-tourism, and small-scale manufacturing to create jobs beyond agriculture.

The limits of adaptation

Salinity-control infrastructures, whether large-scale or small-scale, have their limits, argues independent Mekong ecologist Nguyễn Hữu Thiện.

Enclosed salinity-control infrastructure has partly worsened saltwater intrusion in the Mekong Delta, he said.

“The biggest mistake in responding to drought and salinity has been treating saltwater and brackish water as the enemy,” the ecologist explained. “We’ve tried to engineer our way against natural processes.”

The Mekong Delta once functioned as an open system. As tides entered through river mouths, seawater spread across rivers and smaller canals along the coast, forming broad brackish-water zones. That natural dispersion dissipated the tidal force, reducing the pressure of saltwater pushing farther inland.

Today, most of the Mekong’s river mouths are lined with high dikes and sluice gates designed to block saltwater and tidal surges. By cutting off side channels, these structures force tidal flows into the main river, allowing them to travel faster, higher and farther inland.

Thiện offered a simple analogy: “Imagine dropping a bottle into the Cổ Chiên River at its mouth. At high tide today, it would reach the Mỹ Thuận Bridge about an hour faster than it would have before the river was lined with dikes and sluice gates.”

Take the freshwater zone of northern Bến Tre province. After the Ba Lai sluice gate blocked seawater, saltwater simply found another route – moving upstream through the Mekong’s two main distributaries, the Cửa Đại and Hàm Luông rivers, before looping back into the protected area.

That explains why Lương Hòa commune, despite lying about 40 kilometers from the sea, has faced salinity almost every dry season, much more frequently than before.

“The more we block saltwater along the coast, the farther inland we push the salinity front,” said Thiện.

That principle exposes the limits of individual flood defenses. Bảy’s private dike might have saved his farm, but if thousands of farmers across the Mekong Delta built their own dikes, saltwater would be significantly rerouted.

Thiện said any long-term adaptation should follow Viet Nam’s 2022 Mekong Delta Integrated Regional Plan, based on Resolution 120, which divides the delta into freshwater, brackish and saline zones.

Instead of spending heavily on infrastructure that fights natural water flows, he said, investment should help coastal communities adapt their livelihoods and secure clean water in salt-affected areas.

The shift away from citrus in Lương Hòa is only the beginning of this broader transition, one the delta can no longer avoid.

This story was originally written in Vietnamese and published on Thanh Nien News. It was translated to English using AI and edited by Mekong Eye.

The story was produced in collaboration with RMIT University Vietnam, the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk (IPUR) at the National University of Singapore, and Earth Journalism Network.