Rice production in Vietnam

Rice production in Vietnam in the Mekong and Red River deltas is important to the food supply in the country and national economy.

[1] The Mekong Delta is the heart of the rice-producing region of the country where water, boats, houses and markets coexist to produce a generous harvest of rice.

[6][7] In the geographical region of Vietnam which has a total land area of 33 million ha, there are three ecosystems that dictate rice-growing culture.

Delta is formed by the huge amount of rich and beneficial silt brought in by the Mekong River; this deposit is so large that the shore line is said to extend by 80 metres (260 ft) annually.

[9] The Deltaic formation with an elevation range of 0–3 metres (0.0–9.8 ft) is a flat landscape of "emerald green, it looks as if it were carpeted in AstroTurf.

Because of the flood conditions in the flat low terrain of the delta, houses are built on stilts and roads are taken over embankments.

More frequently, canal systems flowing through the delta are used for transportation and for this purpose they are regularly dredged and made navigable.

[6] Important places of interest in the Mekong Delta are: Vĩnh Long homesteads, Mỹ Tho (gateway to the Mekong Delta, a town founded in 1680 originally by the Chinese refugees, now inhabited by locals practicing vocations of fishing and rice cultivation), and Bến Tre town and canals, Khmer pagodas, Trà Vinh – Mekong's first inhabitants, floating fish farms, Cham villages near the town of Châu Đốc, Phú Quốc island and many more sights.

[11] The French colonized Vietnam in the middle of the 19th century with the basic objective of exporting rice grown in the delta to meet its large costs of colonisation.

[5] During the World War II when the Japanese occupied Vietnam and exploited the rich delta by exporting rice to their country, it denied nearly several million Vietnamese of their basic staple.

[5] While Vietnam was occupied by Japan, the Allies, especially the United States, often bombed roads, making the transport of rice from the south to the north extremely hard.

The inadequate food supply caused the famine in Vietnam; starting with 1943, peaking in March–May 1945 and continuing till the end of Pacific war there was unprecedented starvation.

Two million Vietnamese people were reported to have died of starvation which was attributed to the Japanese rule which was further compounded by unprecedented floods.

In March 1945, Japan overthrew the French colonial administration and sponsored a semi-independent Vietnamese government, the Empire of Vietnam, headed by Trần Trọng Kim.

While this government tried to alleviate the suffering, they were unable to make drastic changes because Japan maintained its wartime agricultural policies that reserved rice for military needs.

At the end of the Vietnamese war in 1975, the country faced acute hardships, as under the Communist regime, cooperative farming through communes was established.

[5] Since then many Legal Constructs have been enacted in Vietnam as a part of Wetland Development, of which the most significant is the Land Law (1994) that gave rights to the farmers, which resulted in an accelerated growth of the Mekong Delta and increase in income to the people.

The inhabitants of the delta are mostly constituted by the ethnic Vietnamese with Chinese, Khmers and Chams forming the minority groups.

This increase is attributed to planting of modern early maturing rice varieties, better management, appropriate Legal Constructs by the Government.

This has boosted the confidence level of the Vietnamese scientists who hope that their country would one day be the rice producer to feed the world.

[21] Research studies have indicated that reclamation of coastal wetlands for growing rice in the tidal zones need to be taken up carefully after assessing the suitability of the soil conditions for levels of salinity and sulfate acids.

According to an expert of Vietnamese rice-growing region:Old rice varieties still have strong characteristic...They can grow in acid sulfate and saline soil and submerged areas.