Agriculture in Vietnam

[3] Foremost among Vietnam's agricultural troubles was exceptionally adverse weather, including a drought in 1977 and major typhoons and widespread flooding in 1978.

[3] Despite this, the severe reversals in the agricultural sector fairly early in the plan period, for the most part, greatly diminished hopes of achieving self-sufficiency in food production by 1980.

Improved incentives for farmers in 1978 and 1979 included efforts to boost availability of consumer goods in the countryside and to raise state procurement prices.

Aside from forming production teams for mutual assistance (an idea that won immediate acceptance), they resisted participation in any collective program that attenuated property rights.

[3] Failure to collectivize agriculture by voluntary means led briefly to the adoption of coercive measures to increase peasant participation.

[clarification needed][3] Between 1976 and 1980, agricultural policy in the North was implemented by newly established government district offices in an effort to improve central control over planting decisions and farm work.

The lax enforcement of state agricultural policies adopted during the war years gave way to a greater rigidity that diminished cooperative members' flexibility to undertake different tasks.

[3] In December 1986, Võ Văn Kiệt, vice chairman of the Council of Ministers and member of the Political Bureau, highlighted most of the major problems of Vietnamese agriculture in his speech to the Twelfth Session of the Seventh National Assembly.

While mentioning gains in fisheries and forestry, he noted that nearly all farming subsectors—constituting 80 percent of the agricultural sector-had failed to achieve plan targets for 1986.

Kiet also blamed the state price system for underproduction of key "industrial crops" that Vietnam exported, including jute, sugar, groundnut, coffee, tea, and rubber.

Production levels of subsidiary food crops, such as sweet potatoes, corn, and manioc, had been declining for several years, both in relation to plan targets and in actual output as well.

By contrast, livestock output, including that of cattle, poultry, buffalo, and hogs, was reported by the government to have continued its growth and to have met or exceeded targets, despite unstable prices and shortages of state-provided animal feed.

[5] Vietnam possesses certain comparative advantages in agriculture and forestry due to the country's abundance of factors in favor of productive crop like cultivation land, forest cover, sea territories, tropical climate and labor (availability and cost).