SBR- Content.pmd - INBO

8 - AgricultureAgriculture 8The agriculture sector is of criticalimportance to the economic lives ofthe people of the Lower MekongBasin (LMB) as well as to theenvironmental well-being of theregion. Agricultural activitiesprovide the livelihoods of themajority of the basin’s populationand comprise, arguably, the mostimportant use of, and pressure upon,natural resources. Over 40 percentof the basin’s land area is devotedto agriculture, and there areimportant interconnections betweenthe ongoing expansion of theagricultural cultivation area and landRice yields range from 5 tonnes per hectare in the MekongDelta to 1.5 tonnes in upland, rainfed areasuse change, especially deforestation. 1 In terms of water use, irrigation – either through the storageof receding flood waters at the end of the rainy season or the diversion of water from rivers andstreams – comprises approximately 80 to 90 percent of all water abstractions in the basin. 2 Yieldsfrom crop production in the LMB are generally low by international standards, and there is scopefor increasing the scale, intensity and efficiency of production. Such changes could significantlyenhance rural incomes and national macroeconomic performance. Increasing commercialisationof production, expansion and intensification of irrigation and the diversification of rice-basedproduction systems into alternative crops with greater financial returns, are all important trendsin this direction. These trends are, however, progressing at very different speeds across the variousregions of the basin. Furthermore, increasing agricultural production could come at the cost ofgreater pressure on both land and water resources. There is the possibility of harmful feedbackcycles where poorly managed agricultural expansion could undermine the long-term sustainabilityof the sector. Poorly managed agricultural development could have negative implications forfuture agricultural activities, as well as other forms of land and water use.Unlike most of the chapters in this report, agricultural statistics were available at a basin level.Thus most of the data in the tables that follow are only for areas of Thailand and Viet Nam that liewithin the basin. Because almost all of Cambodia and Lao PDR lie within the basin, nationalleveldata have been used for these countries. In those few tables where only national level datawere available for Thailand and Viet Nam, this has been indicated with the symbol * in a notebelow the table.145