"No Responsibility and No Rice": The Rise and Fall of Agricultural Collectivization in Vietnam

 Communist leaders in Vietnam attempted to use agricultural collectivization to transform a poor, agrarian country into a modern, socialist nation with an industrialized economy. Collectivized agricultural production lacked sufficient economic incentives for Vietnamese farmers; they preferred to produce privately for household consumption or the free market. State-initiated reforms to collectivize agriculture failed to improve the performance of the agricultural sector, and eventually the Vietnamese Communist Party was forced to abandon collectivization altogether. Once farmers were freed from collective labor and could pursue private production for the free market, Vietnam’s agricultural output skyrocketed.
Mind the GAP: Vietnamese Rice Farmers and Distal Markets
The region of the Mekong River Delta is the most important rice-producing region in Vietnam. Changes in global rice market demands combined with the Vietnamese state’s interest in the economic development of its rural areas are currently influencing agricultural production practices in the region. With a lead farmer in the settlement of Truong Thang, Tam, as the key figure, this chapter investigates what happens when local rice farmers are encouraged to adopt a new production model and internationally recognized “good agricultural practices” (GAPs) in order to become part of a global high-value rice production network. The aim of this chapter was to emphasize some of the local processes of change that are part of a larger regional transformation process with the potential to change the dynamics of the global rice market. For the farmers, the production of GAP-certified high-value rice intended for export markets is radically different from what they are used to. It necessitates a new kind of knowledge, a new organization of production, new time cycles, a new distribution of responsibility, and the formation of new relations between people in their settlements. The analysis of this chapter is based on empirical fieldwork conducted in the Truong Thang settlement in Can Tho Province of the Mekong River Delta region. Based on this work, the key argument of the chapter is that the conversion of production practices that is currently taking place is not a simple case of local adaption to an international demand. Rather, it is a complex process of reconfiguration of societal and territorial embeddedness as the conversion of production practices is necessarily entangled with settlement and household spaces. The conversion of practices essentially relies on local processes of negotiation, on the entrepreneurship of individuals, and on the willingness and ability of farmers to internalize new values, i.e., perform the change.
To What Extent Can English-as-a-Second Language Learners Read Economic News Texts?
In decision making in the economic field, an especially important requirement is to rapidly understand news to absorb ever-changing economic situations. Given that most economic news is written in English, the ability to read such information without waiting for a translation is particularly valuable in economics in contrast to other fields. In consideration of this issue, this research investigated the extent to which non-native English speakers are able to read economic news to make decisions accordingly – an issue that has been rarely addressed in previous studies. Using an existing standard dataset as training data, we created a classifier that automatically evaluates the readability of text with high accuracy for English learners. Our assessment of the readability of an economic news corpus revealed that most news texts can be read by intermediate English learners. We also found that in some cases, readability varies considerably depending on the knowledge of certain words specific to the economic field.