Upland Transformations in Vietnam

8. The Cultural Politics of Agrarian Change in the Highlands of Ba Vì, Vietnam

Cultural Politics of Agrarian Change in the Highlands of Ba Vì  8 The Cultural Politics of Agrarian Change in the Highlands of Ba Vì, Vietnam Jennifer Sowerwine Introduction Since the late 1980s, the Vietnamese government has launched numerous initiatives to alleviate poverty and increase forest cover in mountainous areas through dual processes of decentralization of agricultural and forestry lands and market liberalization. In order to increase productivity and promote economic and ecological stability in the highlands, the state began to allocate agricultural land and forestlands to individual households for protection and production. It also began to deregulate its tightly controlled economy, freeing up agricultural prices, production quotas and trade to market forces. Despite such efforts, numerous studies suggest that economic differentiation between the lowlands and the highlands has widened, with much of the minority populations in the highlands still suffering from food shortages (Castella and Đặng Đình Quang 2002, Poverty Task Force 2002, Scott and Trương Thị Kim Chuyên 2004). Studies such as these, which rely on aggregate statistics, both reflect and reinforce dominant stereotypes in Vietnam, which isolate and place the highlands in an irreparable state of underachievement relative to the lowlands. They fail to illuminate the social relations through which such differentiation occurs, and miss important categories of analysis, reflective of local values, that may provide more insight. It is known that most highland populations remain heavily dependent on sloping lands for agricultural and other forest-related activities to meet household needs (Nguyễn Văn Sản and Gilmour 2000, Swinkels and Turk 2004), yet   Upland Transformations in Vietnam little is understood about the social relations of access to these critically important lands. How do customary practices and local modes of authority interface with new values, opportunities and constraints affecting these landscapes, and with what effect on social differentiation? Recent scholarship in Vietnam is beginning to shed light on the myriad ways in which highland peoples both affect and are affected by political economic landscape transformations.1 In order to better understand whether or how social differentiation is occurring during these transformations, explicit attention to local politics, values and practices in relation to the constellation of forces (state, market, environment) affecting change is critical.2 It is important to look beyond official land-use categories such as “agriculture” or “forest” land as the privileged categories of analysis, as unofficial land uses may be most central to livelihoods and security. Through in-depth case studies, this and several of the other chapters in this book illustrate diverse and strategic ways in which villagers in the highlands exhibit tremendous agency as they negotiate new modes of authority in decisive responses to market and political changes. Studies such as these may help alter the patent victimization trope that dominates much of the literature on upland transformations and ethnic minorities, opening up new possibilities of interpretation. In their analysis of social differentiation in Southeast Asia nearly 20 years ago, Hart, Turton and White argued that the causes and consequences of agrarian change could best be examined by conducting local-level case studies and situating local processes within larger political and economic forces (Hart, Turton and White 1989). Analyzing the cultural embeddedness of political and economic processes at the local level helps to make sense of the “failures of development” as well as the dramatic variability of social response and ecological change in the highlands both within and between villages during the course of economic reform. This paper seeks to broaden discussions about the nature of social differentiation in rural Vietnam by conducting an in-depth case study of agrarian change in a “highland” Dao village at the turn of the millennium.3 As minority communities become increasingly involved in new commodity markets and subject to new forest and land laws, how are patterns and relations of resource access and control being redefined, and with what effect on rural livelihoods and landscapes? This case study demonstrates how privileged access to state resources (reforestation and forest protection programmes) by the village political elite magnified or reinforced differential access to landholdings and opportunities for capital accumulation. However, a tight labour market, a booming commodity market for cassava, Cultural Politics of Agrarian Change in the Highlands of Ba Vì  and the scarcity of arable land enabled the non-elite to negotiate a slight levelling of these differences through invoking what I am calling a cultural “politics of...