Vietnam’s seafood boom: Economic growth with impoverishment?

By 2050 most seafood will be sourced through aquaculture, with a range of production intensities being required to sustain livelihoods and to meet future needs from seafood. This makes Vietnam a particularly insightful case, since Vietnam is at the forefront of the trend toward greater aquaculture production. Our aim in this paper is to examine the social-ecological sustainability of small producer livelihoods contributing to Vietnam’s seafood boom. This paper uses original survey data to understand the range of fishery-based livelihoods that have contributed to Vietnam being a leading global exporter of seafood. We investigate the kinds of fishery-based livelihood activities that households are engaged in, consider the type and amount (kilograms) of species caught or farmed annually, and examine household perceptions’ of change in species quantity. We find that Vietnam’s seafood sector is facing real sustainability challenges: Nearly 30 % of small producers—fishers and fish farmers—within our sample rest at or below Vietnam’s rural poverty line. Ecological decline and disease in farmed fish is perceived to be a serious issue for all fishers. In this context, policy and management interventions need to better reflect social and ecological variability, adopt an integrated coastal systems perspective across fisheries and aquaculture, and consider the most impact-effective poverty interventions.