Vietnamese Agriculture: Rhetoric and Reality

It is a measure of ignorance that this paper should begin with a caveat. The fragmentary and sometimes contradictory nature of reports emanating from Vietnam makes the commentator's task a difficult one. The problem is not really one of an absolute dearth of information, since various Western organizations, notably the J.oint Publications Research Service in the United States, continue to supply reports, but a problem of the absence of comprehensive statistics, of any overview, or even of basic definitions. The sketch now to be presented may be more caricature than portrait, but even caricature contains truth. In selecting two major themes for consideration, the authors hope to use these as bases upon which to build discussion of other related matters. The ques tion of limits to agricultural growth leads to some analysis of land rehabilitation and development as well as to analysis of intensification. Extension of the cultivated area is also part, albeit a minor one, of the transformation to large-scale, centralized production. At the core of this transformation is change in production relationships and while these have changed, they have done so in the direction of greater individualism, thus effectively reversing the thrust to large-scale produc tion (except in respect of state farms).