Vietnam’s largest deltaic region, the Mekong Delta offers great potential for rice production and aquaculture. With an area of 747,000 hectares in 2022, it is the country’s largest shrimp-producing area. The shrimp-rice area covers nearly 190,000 hectares, accounting for 26.8 per cent of the total shrimp farming area in the Mekong Delta. The production of farmed shrimp of all kinds in 2022 reached 1,080,600 tonnes, an increase of 8.5 per cent over 2021; of this the rice-shrimp production reached about 120,000 tonnes.

The year 2022 also saw a significant increase in shrimp exports by 11.2 percent compared to 2021, reaching US $4.3 bn. The Ca Mau province is the second largest area in the Mekong Delta for shrimp-rice farming (after Kien Giang) with 40,000 hectares in 2020. Shrimp farming production here reached 145,000 tonnes in 2017, accounting for 29 per cent of the total production of the Mekong Delta and 22 per cent of the total national production. In recent years, however, climate change and natural disasters like drought and saltwater intrusion in the dry season have hit the productivity of rice- shrimp farming, reducing income for millions of farmers.