A dozen barges, heavy with just-harvested rice, cut their engines and floated to a halt. Two huge rice mills upriver stopped de-husking and bagging as electricity prices peaked.
It was midmorning in Vietnam’s Mekong River Delta — one of the most productive agricultural areas on Earth, in a nation that is the world’s second-largest exporter of rice.
Only birds and a stray motorbike could be heard.
And in the quiet, anxieties unfurled.
Boat captains talked about diesel prices doubling, surging higher and for longer than they did after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Workers on the water and near forklifts worried about having to find new jobs. The scarcity of fuel and fertilizer from the Middle East was already seizing up a food producing giant, and no matter how the war in Iran goes, the next planting looked shaky too.
“If I grow new crops, I’m just pouring money into the ground,” said Vo Minh Tam, a rice farmer who owns a farm supply store where he’s stopped stocking fertilizer because so many neighbors have paused plans for the May growing season. “I’d rather leave it abandoned.”