Factors contributing to household-resilience capacity to farming risks: Case study of clam farming in Thai Binh province, Vietnam

Despite coastal endowment is a unique opportunity for coastal farmers it may be embedded with some risks. Vietnam was ranked 18th in world risk index in 2015 with the vulnerability index of 50.87% (Garschagen, Hagenlocher et al. 2016). In this context, Vietnamese clam farmers have been experiencing increased difficulties. This research focuses on clam production in Thai Binh province which has the largest clam area in northern and northern central coastal Vietnam. The central question of the research was “which factors contributing to farmer’s resilience to clam farming risks”. Results of the research indicated that there are several factors, which altogether explained 66% of variance of resilience among the households, formed three groups including (1) farmer’s ability in gaining experiences from failures and harnessing new opportunities; (2) farmer’s perception toward clam farming risks and its impacts; (3) farmer’s confidence about financial capacity and incomes from diversifying activities which can be used to invest in clam farming. From these research results, several support strategies have been suggested to enhance this capacity of the clam farmers, in order to minimize the losses while maximizing the benefit when people seek for sustainable livelihood.