Climate change bringing rising sea levels and a significant decline in rainfall could hit rice and coffee production in Vietnam, the country's top agricultural crops, from as early as 2020, the Reuters reported, citing the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
“Vietnam's rice production could dramatically decline and rising sea levels could submerge tens of thousands of hectares of cropland by the end of the century,” the ADB said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Vietnam may face an adverse impact from climate change as early as 2020,” the bank said, after it launched a major report on the economics of climate change in Southeast Asia.
According to the report, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam are projected to experience increasingly drier weather conditions in the next two to three decades, although this trend was forecast to reverse by the middle of the century, with 2100 likely to see higher precipitation than the 1990 level.
Vietnam, the world's second-biggest rice exporter, produced 38.7 million tons of paddy last year and exported 4.65 million tons of the husked grain.
Rice is the largest foreign exchange earner among Vietnam's agricultural exports and also the main staple food for most of the country's 86 million people.
Coffee comes second in terms of export revenue among its agro-products. Vietnam is the world's largest producer of the robusta variety and second only to Brazil in overall output.
"The Central Highlands will probably suffer a lot from water shortages caused by climate change," Ayumi Konishi, ADB country director, told a news conference, referring to the region that turns out 80 per cent of Vietnam's total coffee.
The ADB's report did not specifically cover the impact on the coffee crop but said "rainfall could appreciably decline in Vietnam in the coming decades, and over 12 million people could be affected by increased water stress".
Coffee production needs heavy watering from February to April when the dry season peaks in Vietnam's central regions. Water shortages can shrink cherry size and thus cut output. (Reuters, New Hanoi)
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