Upland Transformations in Vietnam

5. Geographical Settings, Government Policies and Market Forces in the Uplands of Nghệ An

Geographical Settings, Goernment Policies and Market Forces in the Uplands of Nghệ An  5 Geographical Settings, Government Policies and Market Forces in the Uplands of Nghệ An Stephen J. Leisz, Rikke Folving Ginzburg, Nguyễn Thanh Lâm, Trần Đức Viên and Kjeld Rasmussen Introduction From the late 1970s until 2002, land law reforms in Vietnam focused on the allocation of land rights to individuals and individual households through the distribution of agricultural and forestland certificates. Previous to this, from the time of independence in the north, all rights to land legally belonged to the state. In the 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s, land resource management took the form of state-run agricultural cooperatives and forest enterprises. By the end of the 1970s it was apparent that these policies had created a situation where agricultural production was deficient and state management of forest areas had led to serious deforestation (De Koninck 1999). Recognizing this, Decree 100 was implemented in 1981; this allowed farmers to use land in return for a fixed amount of the crop produced. Resolution 10 in 1988 emphasized the importance of private property rights, further dismantling the cooperative system, and allowed individuals to have the right to use a plot of land for a period of 15 years, after which the plot would officially revert to the state for possible redistribution. The 1993 Land Law granted expanded private use rights for agricultural land and allowed for the transfer of individual land rights under certain conditions (Government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam 1993). The result of land allocation in the lowlands was the dissolution of cooperatives and distribution of land to households for private use, albeit   Upland Transformations in Vietnam officially for a limited period of time. The implementation of the land law is credited as being one of the main reasons for the improvement in agricultural production in Vietnam since the mid-1980s (Gomiero et al. 2000, Đỗ Quý Toàn and Iyer 2003). From 1943 through the mid-1990s, the quality of upland forests was degraded and the area was reduced from 43 per cent of the country’s total land area to 16 per cent (De Koninck 1999). During the late 1980s and early 1990s, forestlands and management were reformed. In 1993 the government extended the 1988 Land Law into the uplands (Ahlback 1995, MAFI 1993, Sikor 1995, De Koninck 1999), allocating forestland to upland farmers in the same manner as agricultural land. Also in 1993, the government implemented the Law for the Protection and Development of Forests, formalizing a new process for allocating rights to forestland based on the willingness of households to plant trees (Government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam 1994, Gomiero et al. 2000). The 1993 Law for the Protection and Development of Forests was modified by Decree No. 85/1999/ND-CP in 1999, to allow, according to some interpretations, for the allocation of land for agricultural purposes if the land had been used for agriculture in the past (personal communication, Tương Dương District land administration officer, 1 December 2003). In much of the northern uplands, and especially in the upland areas of Nghệ An province where this study was carried out, the effect of the implementation of these regulations has been more ambiguous than in the lowlands. The allocation of individual rights to forest and agricultural land in the uplands aimed to address forest loss. Providing individual households with rights to agricultural land and forestland also had the goal of sedentarizing the households in cases where households and hamlets still practised nomadic swidden (Nguyễn Lưu Thành et al. 1995, Trần Đức 2003, Castella et al. 2006) and fixing in one place the cultivation of fields where rotational swidden was practised (Lambin and Meyfroidt 2010). Logging was officially banned in special use and natural forests in the Northern Mountains, and the amount of logging activity was greatly reduced in this area following the law’s implementation (Tottrup 2002, McElwee 2004). This was also the case specifically in Nghệ An province (Lê Trọng Cúc et al. 1998, Tottrup 2002). The impact on swidden is not as clear. While swidden activity has decreased in many parts of the uplands, it is still found in areas of the Northern Mountain Region (Trần Đức Viên et al. 2006, Trần Đức Viên et al. 2009), specifically in Nghệ An province...