ABSTRACT
In Vietnam, pangasius farming has developed rapidly in the past decades, with the aquaculture of this particular fish species proving to be very beneficial for the local economy. However, the emergence and spread of the Covid-19 pandemic and the policy responses in slowing the spread of the virus have significantly impacted the sector. This paper investigates both the vulnerability and resilience of pangasius aquaculture by identifying the various impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on Vietnam's pangasius sector and the subsequent responses of this sector towards the issues brought forward by it. In this paper, data collected from 195 pangasius farms in Vietnam are operationalized via binary and ordinal logistic regression in an attempt to reveal the factors affecting the sector's output and the factors driving farmers' responses in the context of insecurity caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Since the emergence of the pandemic-induced shock on the pangasius sector, farmers have encountered difficulties regarding the sale of harvests and have been confronted with lower prices for pangasius products, with the sector reporting a reduction in the sales volume and the number of buyers, as well as farmers facing disruptions in logistics and input accessibility. As a response to the impacts of the pandemic, pangasius farmers resorted to a number of coping strategies including feeding pangasius less, reducing the farming scale, delaying harvesting, and/or releasing smaller sized fingerlings. Our regressions suggest that farms signing contracts with buyers are more resilient to the reduction in output price and the reduction in number of buyers but, on the other hand, these farms seem to be more severely impacted by the adverse impacts of reduced sales volume, higher feed price and difficulty to sell harvest compared to those without contracts. Furthermore, our findings suggest that farms selling products to export traders suffered more severely from the reduction in the price of pangasius products and in the number of buyers but, at the same time, these farms seemed to have fewer problems with the reduced sales volume and the increased feed price. Interestingly, our findings also suggest a cross-vulnerability with climate change, specifically with respect to the increase in feed price and the disruption in input logistics, hereby further increasing the vulnerability of pangasius farmers.