Traditional Land Tenure among the Black Thai and its Implication on the Land Allocation in Yen Chau District, Son La Province, Northwest Vietnam

Abstract

Since the mid-1950s Vietnam has experienced a number of changes in its land policy. After the French quit the country, the North Vietnamese government started a collectivisation process following the socialist model. After the reunification, the Government of Vietnam (GOV) extended the collectivisation process to the south. This resulted in serious food shortages in the late 1970s (Pingali and Vo Tong Xuan 1992). As a reaction, the de-collectivisation process started in 1981 with the Directive 100 which gradually shifted responsibility for production from the agricultural cooperatives to farm households. Land allocated to co-operatives could be subcontracted to individual households. By the end of 1987, 30% of the agricultural land in Vietnam was already under private use (Nguyen Van Tiem 1992). The second step began with the Resolution 10 issued in 1988. It restored the farm household as the main unit of agricultural production, which led to a large-scale decollectivisation in most parts of the country (Tran Thi Van Anh & Nguyen Manh Huan 1995). In the third stage, land use rights were allocated to farm households with the Land Law, enacted in 1993, providing long-term tenure security of 20 years for annual crops and aquaculture and 50 years for forest and perennial crops. The concomitantly issued so-called red book certificates (RBC) guarantee the rights to exchange, transfer, inherit, mortgage, and lease land use rights. The land allocation process was complemented by additional reforms in the institutional sector ranging from improved supply with and access to high-yielding varieties, fertilisers and pesticides to the development of a rural credit system (Neef et al. 2000).