Household and Collective in Vietnamese Agriculture

Abstract

The dramatic failure of the ‘Northern model’ applied to southern agriculture in the late seventies brought into sharp focus the debate on the progress of collective farming in the North. Pressures for change in the ‘Northern model’ itself cannot be ascribed wholly to the unsuitability of collective farms for southern conditions — a number of problems had been identified even before the end of the war, while similar pressures also existed in China where outright de-collectivisation has been taking place in many areas since 1978. In fact these movements towards modifying existing collective forms in the agricultural production process echo earlier movements in the 1960s (in both China and Vietnam).