Yielding to high yields? Critiquing food security definitions and policy implications for ethnic minority livelihoods in upland Vietnam

Abstract

Agricultural intensification is at the core of the current agrarian transition in Southeast Asia. New crop varieties promise higher productive outputs, but depend on significant increases in chemical inputs. In the highlands of northern Vietnam, we find that adopting hybrid maize is inevitably associated with an increasing dependence on cash for direct and indirect inputs and investments. This reliance on the cash economy is a new reality for semi-subsistence ethnic minority Hmong households, and provides evidence of the advancing agrarian transition in Vietnam’s remote northern highlands. While livelihood outcomes of hybrid seed adoption include increased maize yields, local farmers highlight numerous drawbacks, including unstable input prices, limited storage periods, pest concerns, and the increased reliance on cash. Strong preferences for the taste of traditional local maize, as well as concerns over regular harvests, lead many households to resist the full adoption of new hybrid varieties and redirect hybrid maize to livestock feed and household alcohol production instead. Thus while state policies extoll the virtues of high-yielding hybrid maize for poverty reduction, we find that food availability is an overemphasized element of household food security and upland agricultural development policies. Food security interventions must move beyond conceptualizing food security as a result of food availability alone, and also incorporate cultural acceptability of food, better understandings of hybrid maize cultivation challenges, and respect the seed diversity on which local livelihoods and food security rely.