The need for sand to build roads and infrastructure in Vietnam charges ahead with few restraints as land and houses are lost.

With bumper crop after bumper crop, the islet’s land price shot up to 10 times higher than farmland on the shore. This convinced him to sell seven hectares of his land on the shore to buy another hectare of islet land.  

“Who would have thought, later on, they allowed too much sand to be exploited, and the whole islet was gradually eroded,” said Phi with a sigh. “Around 2012, people in this region used to pull together to catch illegal sand miners and fight until blood was spilled. 

“Then those smugglers and some district leaders protecting them went to prison.”

Soon after, the government stopped illegal mining in the village, but started issuing mining licenses instead. 

By 2014, Long Phu Thuan was gone. What remains is the daily growl of an engine as dredgers continue to scoop up sand from the riverbed. 

Despite efforts to restrict excessive sand mining in recent years, including a 2017 ban on sand exports, the Mekong Delta’s growing and urgent infrastructure development needs mean that supply cannot keep up with demand.

The shortage has pushed sand prices through the roof, filling the pockets of criminal rings while hollowing out the foundations of local people’s homes and eating away at their farmland.  

Mekong Delta residents have been opposed to sand mining for many years, but with little effect. Only last December, subsidence swallowed five hectares of farmland in a split second in Binh Thuan I hamlet in Vinh Long province. 

Immediately afterward, a dredger sped away amid the shouts and screams of angry locals. Thirteen houses sunk into the river and 109 people lost their homes that day. 

“They have been taking sand away day and night for decades, Vo Minh Thao, who had just lost his house, said in a self-recorded clip. “Now, all the houses, fields and gardens of people have been destroyed.”

Two days later, the provincial People’s Committee suspended sand mining in the area.

“It’s so scary that there were no warning signs of the incoming subsidence,” said Nguyen Huu Thien, an independent expert on the Mekong Delta’s ecology. “It shows that the riverbed had been badly hollowed out for a long time.”

The Mekong Delta of today is the result of 6,000 years of accretion of alluvium and sand from upstream. Today, riverbank and coastal erosion is widespread throughout the delta due to a lack of silt and sand. The culprits are hydro-electric dams that block the flow, along with widespread sand mining in the Mekong River, especially in Cambodia and Vietnam.

As of 2021, there were 621 erosion points along riverbanks in the Mekong Delta totaling 610 kilometers in length, according to the General Department of Disaster Prevention and Control under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

There is no comprehensive data on how much land has actually been lost over the years. Official sources say the Mekong Delta is shrinking by 500 hectares each year because of erosion, or the equivalent to nearly 715 football stadiums. 

The social costs have been enormous. In only five years, from 2018 to 2022, nearly 2,500 houses in the provinces of An Giang, Dong Thap, Can Tho, Vinh Long and Ca Mau were swept away, causing at least VND304 billion (US$12.9 million) worth of damages.

About 20,000 households in these five provinces are now living in subsidence-prone areas and need to be relocated.

“If there are no synchronous solutions in the management of sand mining right now, in the future, with the increasing impact of hydroelectric dams, the shortage of sand will be more serious as erosion will be more severe and intense,” said Nguyen Van Tien, the Deputy Director of the General Department of Natural Disaster Prevention and Control.

Data from the Mekong River Commission shows that about 6.96 million tons of sand is deposited in the Mekong Delta every year, 93% of which ends up in the sea. Meanwhile, the annual sand extraction can be up to 40.2 million tons, meaning each year, the Delta is short of nearly 39.6 million tons, according to estimates by the WWF.

Highway construction is booming in Vietnam as part of the government’s post-pandemic recovery policy. Nowhere are these projects more dire than in the Mekong Delta, where the roads have been neglected for years in favor of other regions. 

As politicians call for work to be completed quickly, construction companies face a near-impossible task: where to find enough sand?

Four highway projects in the Mekong Delta alone will need almost 60 million tons of sand in 2021-2025, according to the Ministry of Transport. Another 43.2 million tons of sand will be needed for provincial transport projects in 2023 and 2024.

There are no publicly available statistics on the total sand supply and demand in the Mekong Delta, but Thien, the Mekong Delta ecology expert who has studied the industry, said that licensed sand in the region only meets 10-20% of the demand. 

Data from individual provinces also offer a glimpse of the situation at hand.

In Vinh Long, for example, 27 licensed mines could supply more than 2.16 million tons in 2023 – only 26% of what the province needs, according to the Department of Natural Resources and Environment.

Data from Can Tho, the central city of the Mekong Delta, show that in 2021-2025, about 4-8 million tons of sand will be needed for leveling, but the total sand reserves in this city total only roughly 7.8 million tons.

In the last days of 2022, a section of the Tien River bordering Cambodia was bustling. Hundreds of barges carrying registration from many Vietnamese provinces and cities were anchored, waiting to buy sand from Cambodia. 

Statistics from the Vinh Xuong Customs Branch show that in 2022, Vietnam imported nearly 7.44 million tons of sand from Cambodia. Barely three years earlier, the amount was nil.

In November 2020, Cambodia quietly lifted a ban on sand exports that had been in place since 2010. Ung Dipola, director-general of Cambodia’s General Department of Mines, told Mekong Eye that sand mining exports to Vietnam would have a minimal environmental impact because Cambodia has strictly regulated the industry.

However, in the eyes of Le Anh Tuan, the former deputy director of the Mekong Delta Climate Change Research Institute, resuming exports was simply a “smart” business move: “They are taking advantage of the sand resource before it drifts freely to the Mekong Delta.” 

There are records of 17 companies importing sand from Cambodia via the Vinh Xuong Customs checkpoint. One of them imported 6,000 tons of sand to then re-export it to Singapore in 2022. 

In the Mekong Delta, even when sand mines have licenses, their operations are still a mystery to local communities. Sand mining companies do not have to publicize their logbook of sand sales, nor revenue or profit, to anyone, except the government inspection team. 

According to Ph, the former manager of a sand mining firm in Hong Ngu city in Dong Thap province, the profits sand miners make there are outrageous. A sand dredger can earn 400-450 million dong ($17,000 to $19,000) a day, which could amount to 13.5 billion dong ($570,000) a month.

Sand miners are not only taking sand over their licensed limit, but are also taking it from outside their licensed territory.

“You’ve got to mine beyond the mine, otherwise there’s not enough sand. For example, I issue you a license to mine spot A, but you’ll also mine spots B, C, D and E. You’ll leave out point A, so when inspectors come to survey and evaluate sand reserves, they’ll notice there’s still sand left and will extend the mining license,” Ph said.

“They exploit 4,000-5,000 cubic meters [4,800-6,000 tons of sand] per day, but only issue invoices and record 200 cubic meters in the logbook, which means only about 4-5% have invoices. The rest are sold loosely, without papers,” Ph added.

He added that local people understood the tricks the sand miners employed, but few dared to speak out for fear of retaliation.

“The sand miners hire gangsters to protect them,” Ph said. “You may not be afraid, but if they threaten your children, no matter how tough or delinquent you are, you must be scared.”

Even state-funded river embankment projects with legitimate sand supply agreements have to pay sand dredgers 5-7 million dong ($231 to $299) under the table if they want to get sand quickly, said an agricultural construction official who asked to be identified as H due to the sensitivity of the matter. 

“The boats that suck sand illegally out of the river that get caught and fined by the authorities are too small compared to the licensed miners that extract sand over the limit,” said D, the owner of a construction business with barges to buy and sell sand in Can Tho. He asked that only his initial be used for fear of reprisals from the sand mafia. 

Only 10-20% of sand supplied actually has legitimate invoices, D added. 

The absence of invoices not only helps businesses evade taxes, but also allows them to under-report the amount of sand they mined. 

“Businesses that want to trade sand legitimately can never do it. They must get involved with the underground sand industry because legitimate and illegitimate sands are mixed, said D. “Therefore, businesses are forced to go through sand intermediaries to buy sand and obtain ghost invoices to legalize their origins.” 

The area near My Thuan bridge, which borders Vinh Long and Tien Giang provinces, has been famous for many months as a place where sand thieves roam all night.

Senior Colonel Nguyen Viet Dap, the head of Vinh Long’s Environmental Crime Prevention and Control Department, said fighting the sand mafia was very difficult, especially along Vinh Long’s border. 

He claimed that the sand mafia always had people monitoring the police station. Every time a police officer gets into a boat, the sand smugglers are notified immediately. Even after the government introduced punitive measures for illegal sand mining in 2017, enforcement remains difficult.

“That’s just a rule, and the police cannot enforce it on their own,” Dap said. 

Illegal sand miners are increasingly more cunning, taking advantage of loopholes in the law to avoid heavy punishments, Dap added. According to the Penal Code, sand miners would only be criminally charged if they are caught extracting sand worth at least 500 million dong ($21,300), or if they are repeat offenders.

Illegal sand miners only need to ensure they don’t exceed this threshold while changing their dredgers frequently.

Nguyen Chi Kien, the deputy director of Can Tho city’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment, added that there were many violations happening along the administrative borders. This makes it harder to catch and fine the criminals because they can easily escape from local authorities’ jurisdictions. 

To make matters worse, the coordination between neighboring provinces to stop illegal sand mining is “not tight enough,” said a representative of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment in Vinh Long province, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

Inspection plans often get leaked to suspects, jeopardizing police operations, he added. 

Besides small and isolated cases of busted illegal sand mining operations, the biggest case in 2022 in the Mekong Delta involved the issuance of 997 fake invoices for nearly 2 million tons of sand in An Giang and Dong Thap.

An Giang police arrested two people for “buying and selling invoices illegally” totaling 102 billion dong ($4.3 million). 

“A huge amount of sand has been mined illegally over many years and it’s not reflected in any of the official reports,” said Thien, the Mekong Delta expert. “I think we need to monitor and make sand mining transparent, to prevent interest groups from profiting from this national resource.”

It is not by chance that people in erosion-prone areas in the Mekong Delta see sand mining as an enemy. They say that if you take it from the river, you must give it back to the river.

But the paradox is that businesses exploiting rivers freely benefit, while people like Phi in Dong Thap, and Thao in Vinh Long, have to pay too high a price with their land, livelihoods and houses.

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This story is part of the “A Thirst for Sand” series, which was produced in partnership with the Environmental Reporting Collective. This partnership brings in journalists from 12 countries to expose how a weakly regulated industry overlooks the environmental destruction and human toll of the highly lucrative and low-risk business of sand mining.

Data visualization is provided by Kuang Keng Kuek Ser and Richa Syal, Environmental Reporting Collective. Maps used in this story are sourced from Mapbox and Google Earth.

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