"“This land was mine, it eroded slowly from the riverbank and after a while, the whole chunk of land totally collapsed,” Than Zaw Oo, a farmer on the Salween River in southeastern Myanmar’s Mon State, told Reuters recently. He said he’s lost three-quarters of his land to erosion and is now a few thousand dollars in debt from paying for embankments to try to preserve his farm. As COVID-19 shakes economies and lockdowns leave many without income, the pandemic raises questions about the security of our food supply. Agriculture in Southeast Asia is so far stable, though the region’s farmers were already struggling with significant challenges from drought and climate change before the pandemic hit. But farmers are now also seeing impacts from sand mining, a sprawling industry fueled by demand for concrete and glass for cities and infrastructure projects. Along rivers and off coasts throughout Southeast Asia, miners use dredging machines to extract the sand, piling it on barges to be sent to megacities like Bangkok and Jakarta or further afield. The world’s largest sand importer is Singapore, which uses it for land reclamation projects. The biggest sources for sand mining in the region are Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar and Vietnam. According to a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report, the global demand for sand has tripled over the past 20 years to around 50 billion tonnes per year, more than any other natural resource. The same report shows that sand extraction drives pollution, flooding, lowering of aquifers and drought..."