Cultivating the Colonies: Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies

4. Aerial Photography and Colonial Discourse on the Agricultural Crisis in Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930–1945

109 4 Aerial Photography and Colonial Discourse on the Agricultural Crisis in Late-Colonial Indochina, 1930–1945 David Biggs From 1880 to 1930, the French colonial government in Indochina supported rapid canalization and settlement in the recently cleared forests and marshes of the Mekong Delta (see map 4.1). The region’s population increased fourfold in that era to more than four million persons, and the area of land put under cultivation expanded from roughly four hundred thousand hectares, consisting mostly of small landholdings along alluvial banks bordering creeks and rivers, to more than two million hectares covering much of the vast floodplains.1 Despite this rapid reclamation campaign, when the global economic depression hit in September 1930, a free fall in rice export prices combined with several floods to produce what French economist Paul Bernard (1934, 123–24) called an “agricultural crisis,” a combination of economic, political, and ecological factors that left more than three million tenant farmers as well as many landowners bankrupt. The near-total confiscation of most rice stocks by plantation owners, needed to repay debts, triggered many local revolts. These peasant revolts in the Mekong Delta helped fuel a broader anticolonial agenda spearheaded by newly formed local cells of the Indochinese Communist Party. In response to this complex crisis, French civil servants, agricultural engineers, and social scientists spent much of the 1930s formulating new approaches to the agricultural crisis in Cochin China. Of all the tools  | David Biggs used in their analyses, none were more effective in shaping public opinions and proposed solutions than aerial photography. In particular, aerial photographs comparing the abandoned terrain in the Mekong Delta to densely parceled landscapes in the Red River delta (see fig. 4.1) were very effective in shaping colonial policies. Human geographers such as Pierre Gourou (Les paysans du Delta Tonkinois [1936]) gained national and international notoriety for their detailed studies of traditional patterns of soil and water management, drawing extensively from aerial photography. Besides the catalyzing effect that this new “view over the village hedge” offered in an era of populist and reformist support for family farming, aerial photographs also were instrumental in hardening late colonial perceptions of traditional agriculture and the Tonkinese peasant in colonial research. Gourou’s “Tonkinese peasant” was in part a fabrication of Indochinese Orientalism, backed up with new evidence in the form of aerial photographs showing densely parceled, irrigated landscapes subject to the same Orientalist lens. This photo-aided imagination of northern peasants as heroic or superhuman ultimately played into Vichy-era and post-1945 programs to resettle thousands of northern farmers, from what was in many places a famine-stricken landscape, into the troubled wastelands of the Mekong Delta. This essay addresses the role that aerial photography, in the hands of human geographers and other social scientists, played in the formation of two colonial ideals that had significant physical consequences for mass resettlement and infrastructure development in the Mekong Delta in the 1940s and throughout both Indochina Wars. Aerial photographs , as interpreted by Gourou and others, contributed to the formation of two dominant ways of “reading” nature in these intensely complex, human-altered hydraulic environments. First, comparisons of aerial photography between the two river deltas produced what I consider to be an Orientalist reading of human nature in comparing the ways northern and southern farmers managed water in two ecologically distinct river deltas. Gourou and many others were complicit in creating a myth that the genius of the intricate landscapes in the Red River delta was resident within northern peasants and that, in contrast, failure in reclaiming the Mekong Delta was due to the inherent “laziness” of southern farmers. Map 4.1: The Red River and Mekong River Deltas in Vietnam.  | David Biggs The second “reading” that aerial photographs fostered was an equally potent misreading of built landscapes where social scientists assumed that the cellular system of locally managed dikes in the north could be reproduced with the same effects in the south (regardless of very different hydraulic conditions in these two environments). Aerial photographs combined with ethnographic studies in the north helped produce an idealized unit for government-sponsored development and resettlement: what scientists and engineers called a casier, an encasement of land and people within a surrounding flood dike. While early attempts to build such settlements in 1944 were failures, the idea of controlling both the environment and the community within such a social and environmental...