Continuing on for primate conservation, we're going to narrow down our focus. So what we're going to be looking at right now is we're going to be going through and doing a case study for Vietnam, throughout the entire course, definitely discussed work in Vietnam. Now, we're going to go through and think about all of the topics about primate diversity, talk about conservation threats, and really apply that directly to Vietnam. The first thing that I always like to ask people is immediately what comes to mind when I say Vietnam? It can be a complicated answer depending on who I'm asking, what your background is, how old you are, what your focus is for a number of things? For many people, you can conjure up these ideas of water buffaloes and rice paddies, a very verdant green land and landscape. For some people, it's just going to be more. Vietnam is not necessarily a place but is more a period in American history, major of that was just one particular conflict in Vietnam. Vietnam has had a really long history of conflict, wars with China, wars with France, wars with the US, wars with Cambodia, wars back again with China. Definitely, a land that has had a long history of conflict, but that really is changing now. Is it beaches and an absolutely amazing coastline? There's been a huge increase in tourism throughout Vietnam over the past couple of decades and for good reason, it is a fantastic place to go visit. There's a wealth of things to see, lovely people to meet, and so it's definitely one more facet to it. Is it a rapidly developing country? Is it a country that has seen huge economic strides? You can have large modern cities that still retain some of the old history and old charm. Here's a picture of Ho Chi Minh City, and that's the new Lotus Building, that's a helicopter pad there, it's really cool the way it lights up at night. I guess there's a teahouse up towards the top floor. I've actually haven't been in it. I've walked around it. There's some fantastic old old-school restaurants right around that area. It's always fun to check out. Speaking of restaurants, do you think about the food? Like the noodle soup, a very popular dish, and just getting the opportunity to walk through the markets and to see all of the different produce that's there, that's available, giving an opportunity to sample any number of dishes, it's really not a terrible place to work. Then more specifically for this course, we can talk about the diversity of primates that live there and the fact that so many primates only live in Vietnam, nowhere else in the world. Continuing on with the background, so we can say that Vietnam is home to 25 species of primates, and 22 of those are at risk of extinction. It's an incredible amount of diversity in Southeast Asia second only to Indonesia for the amount of species that live there. But we've got meerkats, we've got gibbons, we've got dukes, saw some of our langurs, and we've got some of our loris. We'll go into more detail on that in the next video, but just wanting to show a rough sketch that there is a wide diversity here. In terms of some of just nuts and bolts of it. Land area 329,560 kilometers, roughly about the size of Colorado or the size of New Mexico, but a very long and very skinny country in some segments. It's been described as a pole carrying two rice baskets, so you've got the rice basket in the North, the Red River Delta, and then the rice basket down the South, the Mekong Delta. Population, 98.7 million estimated. Now again, if we're going to make that analogy to Colorado, Colorado being the same land area approximately, Colorado has about 5.79 million people, so we're talking a much, much smaller population. We're talking a very different population density. Another thing that we've talked about in terms of conservation threats and conservation issues is poverty. What we can show here, so in the national income, about $430 annually in 2003, in 2006, looks like it was about $690, in 2009, it reached $1052, in 2012, we're seeing about $1400, and then the World Bank predicts it at about $1700. We're definitely seeing that there is a change in wealth distribution, we are seeing that there is this growing middle-class, so that is equaling more disposable income. You still most certainly have pockets and ethnic minorities within Vietnam that still are much lower down on the economic scale and still do face and deal with a number of issues of poverty, but there's less issues of people having to go out into the forest and into these protected areas and just do subsistence hunting. Now we're seeing the other side of that where you have people that have moved towards cities and more urban areas, but want to go back and visit these countrysides because they still have a taste for some of this bushmeat or some of these wild delicacies or traditional medicine. We'll go ahead and we're going to move on to primate biodiversity, but then we're also going to talk about threats. A good chance to meet those numbers of primates that we've talked about, and then think about what are some of these other issues that we anticipate seeing in this rapidly developing country.
