by Vu Kim Chung
Vietnam's remarkable agricultural growth, largely fuelled by its huge rice production, is in danger of petering out.
A partial remedy may be found in raising pigs and other livestock, policymakers were told during the first week of March 1999 during a two-day regional conference in Hanoi.
While output has shot up, the agricultural sector's contribution to the economy dropped from 40 per cent in 1991 to 29 per cent in 1995 as industry and services came to the fore. Nevertheless, 70 per cent of the labour force - about 30 million people - is rural and a million more people enter the job market each year. Idle roughly 30 per cent of the time, rural workers are on the losing side of a widening income gap in a supposedly socialist country that is rapidly sliding back to avarice and venality on the part of the political and economic elite, as it was prior to the peasant revolts of the 1930s and all the wars fought since then. A sad day for all those Vietnamese who suffered and sacrificed much to win that freedom, now to only see it being taken away from them again in a typical East Asian attitude of take what you can as you can and too bad for the little people.
Hanoi is concerned about the potential for political and economic instability, which has already rocked numerous provinces as many of the rural people see too much rhetoric and hypocrisy arising out of the rapid changes passing over Vietnam, changes that for the most part are benefitting only the new economic and political elite and denegerating the quality of life for everyone else. There is also the prospect of significantly increased urbanisation, for which city officials are unprepared as they continue to pretend to espouse the benefits of the rural collective, only so that they can corner more of the nation's resources for themselves.
The rural economy is dominated by rice, with everything from irrigation to research geared to its production. With little room for new farmland and limits to the intensification of production, a move away from dependence on rice seems inevitable. Volatile world rice prices also make the move desirable, as does concern over the environmental impact of rice farming.
Blessed by year-round heat, abundant water and cheap labour that is more productive and hard-working than anywhere else in Southeast Asia, experts say Vietnam has huge potential for expanding production of more valuable commodities such as coffee, rubber, tea, cashews, fruit, vegetables and seafood. However, building up a competitive, diversified industry will require difficult changes, from reforming state-owned enterprises to giving freer rein to the private sector.
However, even modest improvements - such as better breeding and veterinary services for pigs - could yield earnings of close to US$700 million a year, according to Francesco Goletti, a researcher for Washington's International Food Policy Research Institute, the conference sponsor.
Vietnam has Centuries-old History of Rice Cultivation
Of the three most important food crops, wheat, wet rice and corn, wet rice was the first plant to be domesticated in Southeast Asia, and is also the primary crop in the world's four important agricultural regions: Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Central America and North China. Actually, two kinds of wet rice have been adapted for domestic use: the Asian (Oryza sativa) and the African (Oryza brevigulata), with the latter being domesticated much later than the former, according to Vietnamese agronomist Prof. Bui Huy Dap. Presently, Asian rice is widely grown in the world including Africa, where African rice is restricted to some particular zones.
Many researchers believe Asian rice originated from Southeast Asia or more precisely from Indochina and India but some Chinese authors have said it was first domesticated in the plains of Guangdong and Zhejiang. However, many documents on archaeology, genetics, botany, and agronomy have indicated that Asian rice was domesticated in a long stretch of land extending from the eastern side of the Himalayas to Assam, the Myanmar and Thailand border zone and northern Viet Nam. Asian rice was domesticated after tuber plants and gourds in the middle of the Stone Age, the Hoa Binh Culture Era. American archaeologist W. Solheim, who made an intensive study of Southeast Asia, called it "the earliest agricultural revolution of mankind" (1977).
Thus, rice cultivation in Viet Nam has an age-old history, and Vietnamese farmers together with their counterparts in India, Myanmar and Thailand were the world's first rice growers.
The Hoa Binh Culture Era lasted from the epoch of "grottos" and the "pre-cultivation era" to the dynasty of the Hung Kings, about 4,000 years ago. During this time Vietnamese farmers grew rice on flat land or slightly inclined hill slopes formed by old sediment soils. Then, as the sea retreated in the Late Holocence epoch (about 2,000-4,000 years ago), the delta of the Red river was formed. And Vietnamese farmers began to dominate the delta with their rice cultivation which became an integral part of the Dong Son Culture as illustrated on brass drums. A copy of the Ngoc Lu Brass Drum was presented by the Government of Viet Nam to the United Nations on its 50th anniversary and is being exhibited at the UN headquarters in New York City. With the raising of wet rice, an agro-civilization was formed in the Red river delta that spread over the entire country in its thousands of years of history. Remains of the Mai Pha Culture Era recently unearthed in Lang Son have evidenced the dawn of Viet Nam's history.
At the world summit held in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in June 1992, all countries especially the developing nations agreed to develop a stable agriculture. The World Organization for Ecological and Environmental Development (WPED) defined "sustainable agriculture" as the exploitation of natural resources for present needs without affecting future generations.
Thus, Viet Nam's rice cultivation remains stable although the market may be weakening and increasing droughts due to detrimental changes in land use. Relics found at Tu Xa village in ancient-time Phong Chau show the four periods of cultural development: the Phung Nguyen Culture in its early stage, the fully developed Dong Dau Culture, the Go Mun, and the Dong Son Culture until it reached its demise. Viet Nam's rice paddies are at least 4,000 years old, and festivals about rice cultivation dating from the Hung Kings' Dynasty are still organized. Historical and cultural vestiges in the northern and north central plains indicate rice has been cultivated for two to three thousand years.
Vietnamese farmers have a proverb that says: "Try to persist for thousands of years to see how many people farm the land."
At the beginning of the current era, rice production in Viet Nam yielded about three or four hundred kilograms of paddy per hectare. In 1942, it reached 1.3 tonnes. But since 1993, the average paddy yield has been 4.7 tonnes per hectare. In 1996, the rice land of the Red River delta gave 5.27 tonnes of paddy per ha for the spring crop (6.7 tonnes per ha in Thai Binh province).
The rice land of the Mekong Delta was first cultivated some 300 years ago. Its annual crop yielded 1.4 tonnes of paddy per ha on average. With two crops per year, the winter-spring and the summer-fall, since 1995, the rice cultivation in the southern delta has an average yield of 4.25 tonnes per ha.
Highest yields of paddy have long come from the spring crop in the north and winter-spring crop in the south; 50 percent of rice production nationwide is from the Mekong Delta.
Viet Nam's wet rice land was enriched by the restructuring of agriculture. In the Low Plains, farming was combined in the form of VAC, the Vietnamese acronym for gardening, aquaculture, and rearing, and was successfully implemented; in the Highlands, it is the RVAC, afforestation, gardening, aquaculture and rearing combination.
Rice cultivation made up 67 percent of the total planting areas across the country in 1996 but with the industrialization and modernization process, this rice growing area will decrease due to the planting of other crops in the highlands and low plains. Thus, from an agro-civilization, Viet Nam will proceed toward the industrialization and modernization of the country with the application of the latest achievements in agriculture and bio-technology.