Agricultural Land in Vietnam: Markets Tempered by Family, Community and Socialist Practices

Since the late 1980s, markets involving agricultural land have emerged in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. One major reason is that collective farms, previously a central feature of the country's political economy, ended. And a major reason for that was villagers' everyday politics gnawe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of agrarian change Vol. 6; no. 3; pp. 285 - 305
Main Author KERKVLIET, BENEDICT J. TRIA
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford, UK Oxford, UK : Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.07.2006
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Subjects
community
everyday politics
family
land
law
markets
peasantry
peasants
socialism
Vietnam
Vietnam
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Summary:Since the late 1980s, markets involving agricultural land have emerged in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. One major reason is that collective farms, previously a central feature of the country's political economy, ended. And a major reason for that was villagers' everyday politics gnawed the underpinnings of the collectives until they collapsed. Rural households, for the most part, wanted to farm separately. Today they do. Land is not privatized, however. Farming households have land use rights, not ownership. This tempers markets, as do other conditions arising from contending schools of thought in Vietnam about how land should be used, distributed and regulated.
Bibliography:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2006.00123.x
istex:A7A992A8D4E0BC10E05C4A7AE5E66CBE9022737C
ArticleID:JOAC123
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ben.kerkvliet@anu.edu.au
I am grateful to Stan Tan Boon Hwee for his comments on a draft of this paper and to Le Van Sinh, Nguyen Quang Ngoc and Pham Thu Thuy for their research assistance. I also thank Jun Borras and other organizers of the ‘Land, Poverty, Social Justice and Development’ conference (12–14 January 2006) at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, for inviting me to prepare and present an earlier version of this article.
Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, Professor and Head, Department of Political and Social Change, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia. e‐mail
ISSN:1471-0358
1471-0366
DOI:10.1111/j.1469-7580.2007.00715.x-i1