Contents & Foreword, Characterizing And ... - IRRI books

farms that have suitable conditions for growing higher value crops may nonethelesscultivate rice because of transport concerns. We return to this hypothesis shortly, whenwe review an accessibility analysis for road and river transport systems in the MekongRiver Delta.Land-use dynamics in the Mekong River Delta: an illustration of integrationThe increase in rice production in Vietnam during the 1990s represents a successstory in Asian agricultural development. Increases in rice production in the MekongRiver Delta, which supplies about half of Vietnam’s total rice production, averagedabout 6.3% per year during the nineties, according to government statistics (GovernmentStatistical Office 1998). These increases took the country from having a largedeficit between rice demand and supply to becoming the third largest rice exporterworldwide. This expansion contributed to Vietnam’s high rate of GNP growth byproviding urban areas with cheap food and generating foreign exchange earnings.Although the national statistics on rice production in Vietnam are widely known,there have been few studies of the farm-level changes in rice production techniquesand land-use changes that have led to production increases. This research providesinsight into the farm-level changes in agricultural production that, when aggregated,caused the production increases. We make use of previously collected longitudinalfarm-household survey data and existing biophysical characterization of the MekongRiver Delta. Farm-level changes in rice output with production, land use, and supplyestimates are examined by using data from longitudinal household survey data thatsolicited farm production information for each year between 1994 and 1997. Thesurvey covered about 150 farms from 8 villages in the Mekong River Delta and 2villages from river basin areas in Dong Nai Province. Sampled villages represent arange of agroecological and production situations. Because of nonreporting of somevillages, and to a lesser extent farm attrition from the survey, the sample size variesover time. The data were collected by the Institute of Agricultural Sciences of Vietnam.1 Because of developments in water management infrastructure in the area, itoffers an ideal context in which to examine the effects of changes in water availabilityon agricultural production at the farm level. Different villages taking part in the longitudinalsurvey can be taken to represent different stages of development betweenrainfed rice agriculture and irrigated farming. We can trace farm-level changes accompanyingthe transition from a rainfed to irrigated agricultural rice system usingthe data. Another major development in the study area during the 1990s was the deepeningand geographic extension of market reforms begun in 1989. These changesmake the area and time period ideal for economic study.1 The data were originally collected for a research project involving the Institute of Agricultural Sciences ofVietnam and the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences of Gembloux, University Mons-Hainaut, Belgium.450 Edmonds and Kam