Land Deactivation Amidst Land Policy Inertia In Northern Vietnam

Drawing on research in rural or peri-urban communes administered by Hanoi, this article discusses “land deactivation” – the withdrawal of farmers from farming – a reform emerging in a long-cultivated rice growing region of Vietnam. This transformation does not fully align with official policy orientations and poses challenges to the state’s strategic objective of maintaining national rice security. The proximate cause of idle and abandoned land is economic; farming rice has become less profitable than off-farm employment opportunities. This presents a tension between the financial imperatives of farmers and government requirements for agricultural land use. Households ignore government edicts and commune authorities choose not to enforce them, with land holders working against the grain of the policies and aims of the state, and in open sight. This gap between state aims, its aversion to enforcement, and farmers’ practices reflect a failure to fully understand industrialisation and agrarian change in Vietnam and signals land deactivation as the latest in a succession of land reform periods shaped by everyday agrarian practices. The farm and non-farm are in an ancillary relationship, where the logics of a changing economy and society, set within a space of land policy inertia, have led to widespread land deactivation.