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CẦN THƠ, VIỆT NAM – At 4am, Phạm Hồng Loan rises to the roosters’ crow and flicks on the light. Water laps against her small boat and wooden planks rattle beneath her feet as she readies her tools for the floating market – hats, scales and baskets.
Her husband is bedridden with cirrhosis of the liver, so Loan shoulders the family’s burden alone. For the past 20 years, every day she’s taken her boat to the Cái Răng floating market to sell fruit, except for weekends, when she is joined by her daughter and two young grandchildren.
However, these days Loan is not busy. She feeds her grandchilren a breakfast of rambutans and ambarellas, then lunch with a small bowl of noodle soup given free by a kind acquaintance.
“Since the embankment was built [in 2016], fewer buyers and sellers have visited the market and tourists are also less frequent. I leave home about 4-5am and until now, I still haven’t sold much,” Loan told a reporter at noon as the children finally rest after playing in the water.
Until the early 2010s, Cái Răng was still one of the Mekong Delta’s most vibrant hubs. But infrastructure changes in the past decade have disrupted market activities and left many vendors – often women like Loan who carry significant family burdens – struggling to stay afloat.
According to Tiêu Chí Nguyện, Vice-Chairman of Lê Bình Ward People’s Committee in Cái Răng district, in the past decade the floating market has seen a slight decline in residential boats and a dramatic drop in commercial boats, which used to peak at 500, but now number only about 200.
Among those, about 50 are wholesale boats, the rest are service boats, estimates Nhâm Hùng, a researcher of Mekong Delta culture.
A deadlocked situation
Đặng Thị Diệu used to leave the house at 2am to sell fruit at the floating market. These days her family has breakfast at 10am.
“The market then was very crowded, and although it was not easy, I still managed to raise two children. Now I can really get a sense of what unemployment feels like,” she lamented.
Diệu and her husband left their hometown in Phong Điền for Cái Răng about 20 years ago. She recalled seeing a myriad of job options when they first arrived – trading, boat rentals and transporting agricultural products.
The Cái Răng floating market was formed at the intersection of four rivers around the beginning of the 20th century as a trading hub for household items in the Mekong Delta, Hùng says.
The market expanded quickly after the state subsidy period (Đổi Mới) ended in 1986, as agricultural output surged. It was then relocated to the Cần Thơ River, a part of the Hậu River-Xà Nô canal, known as one of the main rice routes of the Mekong Delta region.
Hùng contended that the scaling down of the Cái Răng floating market was partly due to improved road infrastructure in the Mekong Delta in the past decade. Fruit once transported by boat can now be carried by truck.
After losing its main function, which was wholesale transport, the floating market now caters mostly to retailers and tourism.
The river embankment project, which is aimed at preventing riverbank erosion, ensuring flood safety and whose construction is ongoing, is seen by many vendors as another factor that disrupted market activities.
Minh, a vendor and resident of the floating market for more than 20 years, who wished to speak using a pseudonym, has never witnessed such a bleak landscape.
“Since the embankment was built [in 2016], business has suffered. Traders chose to drive directly to wholesale markets because there is no parking here. If they park too far away from the boats, they have higher costs for transport and labor,” Minh explained.
“If it is too difficult for people to do business, they will leave the market. For a floating market to thrive, there must be docks for vehicles to load and unload, facilitating two-way trade. This is a fundamental requirement for any floating market,” said Hùng.
According to Nguyện, since the embankment’s construction, 14 of 18 fruit orchards along the floating market have moved to other places closer to inland wholesale markets.
Minh owns a boat that can carry 20 tons of freight. What used to sell out in a morning or a day now takes him a week or longer.
“It’s so frustrating. If I can’t sell anything, I’ll probably struggle for a while longer and then quit. Some people here have left the river and become transporters for the orchards,” he said.
Minh has options as he is in good health, has savings and healthy parents to help take care of his children. It is much harder for female breadwinners like Loan to abandon their main livelihood.
But even those with options are struggling. Diệu and her husband tried to work as hired labor and later dealt fruit, with the help of her younger brother, but business was slow. Now the couple mostly stay at home taking turns dropping their children off at school and waiting for manual labor jobs.
“I can’t do business because farmers are few and buyers are plenty. Competition is fierce in the orchards. People with money already bought the whole orchards when the melons were small. We don’t have that kind of money,” Diệu explained.
The way out
Hùng contends that Cái Răng floating market bears a significant cultural value that should be preserved at any cost.
As floating markets were originally formed without any government intervention or management, preservation policies should include incentives instead of prevention and control, he said.
“The market will take on a new shape as a tourism destination,” said Hùng. “We should not regret the past, but instead embrace this transformation.”
Hùng said policymakers could attract investors by stating their support for businesses with clarity and transparency, for example with a five or 10-year plan.
Cái Răng vendors, on the other hand, think the embankment should be renovated to suit their existing lifestyle.
Minh suggested the construction of loading docks. The embankment now only caters to pedestrians with stairs and high railings.
In its two-year preliminary report on promoting tourism in Cái Răng district from 2021 to 2025, Lê Bình Ward’s Party Committee made a similar proposal. It also advocated for the creation of kiosks along the shore for traders to store goods.
Legal bottlenecks also need to be addressed to save the floating market.
Nguyện says one of the main difficulties lies in the lack of regulations and overlapping management in the area.
Although technically a market, Cái Răng is not legally recognized as such. It is also not officially a service zone, which are managed by the tourism industry. Boat licensing, on the other hand, is now under the management of transportation agencies.
“If we allow it [the floating market] to develop, who will manage and take responsibility?” Nguyện asked.
Without some quick intervention, the Cái Răng floating market could become more desolate and may even disappear from the tourist map of the Mekong Delta.
In the meantime, the deadlock has already left many people like Loan, Diệu and the younger generations in poverty and isolation.
“I wish I could go ashore so my child would have someone to play with. She has been so sad because she has no friends here,” said Diệu, speaking of a dream that will be difficult to realize.
“Now we can’t even make enough for a living, so how can we talk about buying a house?” she said.
This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network. It was first published in Vietnamese on The Leader Magazine on March 1, 2024.
