Are ‘Landlords Taking Back the Land’? An Essay on the Agrarian Transition in Vietnam

Abstract

This article presents a definition of transition in a poor agrarian economy that emphasises the interrelationship between the differentiation of productive assets, technical change and the accompanying reorganisation of the production process, agrarian accumulation and rural politics. Using these five ‘parameters of transition’, the article demonstrates the radical restructuring of rural production that occurred in Vietnam during the 1980s and 1990s and the impressive accumulation response that followed. It shows that some asset differentiation in certain regions of rural Vietnam may have occurred, and that along with such differentiation there are differences in the technical coefficients of production. In these regions there is now a small emergent class of rich peasants that uses more capital intensive production methods, is producing higher value-added crops and is diversifying into rural non-farm economic activities. This class can be set beside the majority of small peasants who own small amounts of land and use more labour-intensive production methods, as well as a rapidly emerging class of landless wage labour. Finally, the implications of these processes for rural politics in Vietnam are discussed.