Vietnam's Agrarian Reform, Rural Livelihood and Policy ... - Rimisp

development models and it provided more incentives to individuals. The main purpose was to increasethe efficiency of the socialist system rather than adopt a market system.The momentum of partial economic reform was further strengthened by the Soviet perestroika and theeconomic crisis in the mid-1980s. The salient events during this period were the relocation of land tofarmers’ households, decollectivization in 1988, and a series of market liberalization policies from thelate 1980s onward. This process was gradual–not a big bang approach.The second half of the 1990s witnessed the golden age of Vietnam’s economic growth with reforms inthe regulatory and institutional framework of commodity and labor markets, and intensifiedinternational integration. This reform and growth period ended with the Asian financial crisis, leadingthe government to hesitate on providing further reform.Agrarian reform can therefore not be separated from the overall Doi Moi in Vietnam, and it isnecessary to add a stronger policy perspective to the common understanding of the reform process,which is characterized as bottom-up, path-dependent and crisis-driven (van Brabant, 1990; Fforde andde Vylder, 1996). Active policy measures along with market liberalization and international integration,which not only generated innovative ideas but also consolidated the reform process’ performance andoutcomes, have become more important. In agriculture, land tenure reform and decollectivizationstarted first at peasant households and local authorities implemented them in the 1960s and 1970swithin the collective system. Though keeping strictly to the socialist ideologies and centrally planning,the state, under severe economic shortages, gradually accepted individual interests and formallyillegal contract practices. When the upcoming food crisis threatened the survival of the centralplanning and collective system, the political leadership actively reviewed those local experiments andscaled them up into national policies.In the 1990s, market liberalization was chosen to speed up economic growth and industrialization aftera long period of hunger, poverty, and international isolation. Under this pressure, the state played amore active role in consolidating reform results and looking for new options. However, reform efforts inthe 1990s focused more on nonagricultural sectors, as agriculture and rural development were stillbenefiting from the momentum brought about by the drastic reform of Resolution 10 in 1988.6