Killing Phu Quoc Island
By Calvin Godfrey October 23, 2016 | 05:36 am GMT+7
How gross economic pursuits and helter-skelter tourism boom are plundering one of Vietnam’s most precious resources.
Last month, visitors to the Mango Bay Resort on Phu Quoc Island lounged on a pristine beach dotted with tropical plants. Rivulets of fresh water carried the previous night’s rain into the sea from a lush hillside dotted with airy cabins built without televisions or air-conditioners.
In the waves below, rice sacks, plastic bags and crisp packets bobbed up and down while Mango Bay’s ground crew patrolled the sand.
An employee at the eco-resort attributed the detritus to recent storms, a new riverfront market and tour boats that periodically anchor off shore and dump their garbage overboard.
“All of the trash is from Vietnam,” he said, adding that on bad days, the entire staff drop what they’re doing to comb the shore. The resort cleans its beach a minimum of twice a day.
The effort, he said, pays off when tourists booked into other hotels turn up desperate for a clean spit of sand.
But trash isn't the only challenge at the high-end eco-resort.
A few months back, a 45-unit hotel opened on top of their shallow well.
Soon afterward, water stopped flowing. The well they’d relied upon for decades had presumably collapsed, forcing staff to dig deeper. They've since begun recycling wastewater using cisterns filled with aquatic plants.
“We’re doing everything we can to make whatever little water we have last,” the resort employee said.
Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper reported that Huynh Thanh Ha, the head of the local division of the provincial water company KIWACO, had called on tourism companies to stop exploiting underground water resources.
Mango Bay’s trash and water struggles offer but a microcosm of new stresses brought to the island by a tourism boom that seems to lack any oversight. Last month, Tuoi Tre newspaper reported that residents who once drew water from 5-10 meter wells now drill as deep as 60 meters.
When contacted by VnExpress International, Ha claimed that the newly-expanded Duong Dong Reservoir provides sufficient untreated water for residents of the island’s largest city, as well as those living in the southern town of An Thoi and the island of Bai Truong.
He declined to estimate, however, what proportion of those facilities illegally draw water from the island’s underground aquifers. He also declined to offer a picture of what those resources look like.
“We don’t have those statistics on hand,” he wrote in an email. “It would take a lot of time to inspect and gather that information.”
A plan created by the Japanese International Cooperation (JICA) envisions meeting the needs of massive resort and housing developments in the island’s North-East by building a 200-hectare (494-acre) reservoir in the national park. A consultant who oversaw preparation work for the project back in 2014 told VnExpress International he has no idea when it will be completed. The Cua Can project represents the largest of four planned reservoirs nominally slated to come into operation in as many years.
Early this year, the provincial chairman told the Saigon Times they would send a delegation to Macau (effectively a casino colony in an economic tailspin) to study their experience. He also claimed the government would simultaneously invest in wastewater treatment facilities while pushing businesses to treat their own waste.Over a decade ago, UNESCO declared Phu Quoc and over a hundred other islands in Kien Giang Province a World Biosphere Reserve -- a title that appears purely descriptive, if not confusing. At the moment, the province seems more preoccupied with pursuing an unprecedented and elusive “special economic zone” status.
To this day, Phu Quoc continues to lack a single wastewater treatment facility, so everything one flushes down the toilet ultimately ends up in the sea beyond.
Insiders say the projects have gone nowhere because the province’s sole water supplier, the Kien Giang Water Supply and Drainage Company (KIWACO), hasn't offered the right price.
Similar problems have hamstrung efforts to attract funds to process the island’s solid waste. Once buried or shipped off the island, trash now accumulates in festering mountains along the north-south corridor that runs along Phu Quoc’s eastern coast.
Developers refer to it as a “stockpile” for whatever facility does, eventually, come online.
In the meantime, you can expect it to grow.
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