Land accumulation in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam: a question revisited

ABSTRACT

Land accumulation in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam is a reality that has been observed and debated for more than two decades. This article re-explores features of this phenomenon today by analysing data of a rural household survey conducted in September 2014 in Trần Giang and An Giang provinces. The article argues that the process of land accumulation during the post-reform transition in the Mekong Delta is determined by both land- and non-land-productive assets, and has effectively led to an increasing differentiation within the peasant class.

RÉSUMÉ

La concentration des terres agricoles dans le delta du Mékong du Vietnam est un fait saillant qui a été observé et débattu depuis plus de deux décennies. L’objet de cet article est de réexplorer les caractéristiques de ce phénomène dans le contexte actuel par l’analyse des résultats d’une enquête auprès des ménages ruraux menée en septembre 2014 dans les provinces de Tiền Giang et An Giang. Cet article soutient que le processus de concentration des terres agricoles durant la transition post-réforme dans le delta du Mékong est déterminé non pas uniquement par le capital foncier, mais également par d’autres types de capitaux, et que ce processus a effectivement conduit à une différenciation croissante entre paysans.

KEYWORDS:

• Mekong Delta of Vietnam
• land accumulation
• agricultural land use
• social differentiation
• rural development

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Sophie Quinn-Judge for giving many useful comments as well as for taking time to ameliorate my English style. I am also very grateful to the two anonymous referees for their perspicacious critics and remarks. Any error or omission remains my sole responsibility.

Notes

1 These data are the result of research of the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences carried out in 2009 at eight communes of two Red River Delta provinces (Hải Dương and Thái Bình) and two Mekong Delta provinces (An Giang and Hậu Giang), with a total sample of 2,000 rural households (see Bùi Quang Dũng and Đặng Thị Việt Phương 2011).

2 Even now when lands throughout the country are under the “entire people’s ownership” regime, and agricultural households possess only land-use rights, not land-ownership rights, southern peasants in their everyday language continue to talk of “selling lands” or “purchasing lands” instead of “transferring land-use right” as legally and officially stipulated. Therefore, for convenience, this article utilises the commonly used words such as “owning”, “selling” or “purchasing” lands.

3 Under the latest 2013 Land Law, the allocation quota for annual crop land in the Mekong Delta is stipulated as not exceeding three hectares for each agricultural household (unchanged since the 1993 and 2003 land laws), with a land-use term of 50 years (instead of 20 years as previously stipulated), and the authorised acquisition of annual crop land-use right transfer “must not exceed ten times” the quota for each household, meaning a limit of 30 hectares of annual crop land per household.

4 Our household survey was carried out from 22 September until 4 October 2014 in two districts (Cai Lậy in Tiền Giang Province and Châu Thành in An Giang Province). In each district, three communes were selected according to three levels of living standards (high, medium and poor). A representative hamlet was chosen in each commune, and a sample of 80 interviewed households in each hamlet was randomly selected by the method of systematic sampling (kth interval) with an alphabet-ordered sampling frame based on the household register of the concerned hamlet, provided by the commune administration.

5 The household substitution was due to the following reasons: absentees due to migrant labour (29 cases); returning to home in another locality after the crop cultivation (16 cases); moved to another locality (10 cases); lone aged people not able to answer (seven cases); and changes of households which were not updated in the commune register (two cases).

6 A survey carried out in 2010 by Phan and Fujimoto (2012, 36–37) at three villages of Hưng Yên, Bắc Ninh and Hải Phòng provinces in the Red River Delta (with a sample of 164 farm households) noted, similarly, that owner tenants have on average a larger cultivated area per household than owner farmers.

7 This fact was also noted by Phan and Fujimoto (2012, 47) in the Red River Delta: “Expanded farm size was generally accompanied by a higher degree of fragmentation”.

8 A unit of man day is calculated as equal to eight hours of labour per day by a person.

9 A fact that was remarked in the 1990s but still persists today in some extent: in 1997, “state-owned trading firms get 44 per cent of all profit from rice production while farmers get only 16 per cent, going the rest [sic.] to other parties (export agent, small trader and wholesaler/miller) engaged in the grain market”, of which the largest part was accounted for by the state-owned Southern Food Corporation (Diglio and Siddivò 1998, 552, citing Keenan 1997, 31).

10 Under the 1956 land reform scheme of President Ngô Đình Diệm in South Vietnam, the land concentration ceiling was stipulated at 100 hectares per landowner, while that of the “Land-to-the-tiller” programme of President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu in 1970 was 15 hectares (Quang Truong 1987).

11 By “moral economy” of the “upper peasantry” (the class of relatively well-to-do farmers) in the Mekong Delta, Gorman (2014, 501) means their “deep-seated and widely-shared notions of economic and distributive justice”.

12 “Large-scale model fields” of Lộc Trời Group (formerly An Giang Plant Protection Joint-Stock Company, AGPPS) consist in contracts between the company and farmers (comprising about 400 farmers with a total area of about 1,000 hectares for each “model field”), according to which the company has to advance paddy seeds, chemicals and supply technological services to farmers, and commits itself to assure the paddy milling and rice selling (Nguyễn Nghị 2012, 12–13).

Additional information

Funding

This article is part of a research project entitled “Identifying Different Types of Economic Behavior of Peasant Households in Contemporary Mekong Delta” (principal investigator Trần Hữu Quang), funded by Vietnam’s National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) [grant number I3.1-2012.13].

Notes on contributors

Hữu Quang Trần

Trần Hữu Quang holds an MA in sociology from the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium, 1992) and a PhD from the Institute of Sociology (Hà Nội, Vietnam, 2001). He is an associate professor in sociology at the Southern Institute of Social Sciences (Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences). His research interests include sociological theories, rural sociology and sociology of mass media. His recent book is Xã hội học báo chí ([Sociology of Print Media], 2006; second edition 2015, Hồ Chí Minh City National University Publishing House).