It is a small, wealthy, mainly western elite who have an unlimited supply of beef and pork.
But fish, rice and noodles feed 3 billion hungry mouths on this side of the planet.
It didn't occur to me at the time, but on reflection, today's tour was more important than every pile of old rocks we have seen to date.
Dung was our guide. He was never without a cigarette which he waved more than he smoked.
First he took us to a fish farm. Chau Doc has 2,000 of them. It is a cottage industry on an industrial scale. Houses float in the river. Beneath the floor boards, nets are slung and into these, immature fish are piled through a hole in the floor. Up to 70,000 occupy a space 20' x 30' x 20'. At 3 weeks they are each 2cm. At 7 months they are 12 inches. It gets crowded.
The Vietnamese have more fish than they can eat. The rivers and rice paddies are full of them. The fish farms supply the export market.
Before we arrived at the rice warehouse, Dung talked fast. Chau Doc is close to the Cambodian border. Smuggling and unregulated movement of goods on the river is rife. The river police, he said, couldn't be bothered to patrol at night, so anyone with a boat had carte-blanche to move goods across the border without duty or the appropriate licence. Boats already seem to sail grossly over loaded and low in the water. At night, they add more than the legal limit. They sink regularly, for no other reason. Two last month on this stretch of the river, he said.
The police came up regularly in Dung's diatribes. Take fines for instance. He listed countless petty infractions that attracted the greedy and corrupt traffic police. Speeding, leaving the scene of an accident, not wearing a helmet, jumping the lights, running over pedestrians. He started to lose my sympathy at this point. And the list went on and on. The roads are mayhem, he agreed, but his solution was complete de-regulation. His friend was paying three years wages in compensation for killing a cyclist with the company bus, last year.
It just wasn't right.
He had become quite animated by now so I was glad to disembark at the rice warehouse where we saw the grading, de-husking and polishing of the staple food source of the Vietnamese people. Brown rice is regarded as fattening and avoided. White rice exports produce 3 billion dollars of revenue, placing Vietnam as the third largest exporter behind Myanmar and Thailand.
Across the road was the noodle factory where rice is ground to powder before being mixed with water to form a pancake syrup that is poured onto a circular stove top and cooked for 30 seconds. The pancake is lifted and left to cool for 2 hours in the sun before being fed through a cutting machine that produces the long strips that we know as the noodle. The 8 staff produce a ton of noodles per day in a relatively benign environment with the exception of the noodle cutter that consists of a rotating grooved spindle that draws the pancakes in to the cutting surface. There were no guards and the young operator’s fingers came perilously close to the cutting edge on each iteration.
It can only be a matter of time before a misjudgement gives one lucky noodle consumer some extra protein.
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