Agricultural land in Vietnam: Markets tempered by family, community and socialist practices

Abstract

Since the late 1980s, markets involving agricultural land have emerged in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. One major reason is that collective farms, previously a central feature of the country's political economy, ended. And a major reason for that was villagers' everyday politics gnawed the underpinnings of the collectives until they collapsed. Rural households, for the most part, wanted to farm separately. Today they do. Land is not privatized, however. Farming households have land use rights, not ownership. This tempers markets, as do other conditions arising from contending schools of thought in Vietnam about how land should be used, distributed and regulated. © 2006 The Author. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Henry Bernstein and Terence J. Byres.