The Japanese in occupation of Vietnam, the American government directing attacks on the transport system, or the country's French colonial administration could have acted to limit, or even reverse, the famine.

According to the diplomat Bui Minh Dung, "the Japanese occupation of Vietnam was the direct cause, in the final analysis, of several other factors, in turn affecting the famine, but their military efforts together with their economic policy for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere per se seem to have systematically played a role considerably greater than any other factors in the Vietnamese starvation.

[citation needed] The crop failures of 1943–1945 were compounded by lack of dike maintenance after the US bombing of the north and the catastrophic rainfall of August–September 1944, causing flooding and loss of rice plants.

[citation needed] After the Great Depression in the 1930s, France returned to its policy of economic protectorate and monopolized the exploitation of natural resources of French Indochina.

Japanese troops forced farmers to grow jute, instead of rice, thus depriving them of needed food, but France had already started the same policy to a smaller degree.

In the meantime, the Vichy civilian administration was highly corrupt, dysfunctional and unable to distribute remaining food stocks to areas where needed.

[citation needed] In March 1945, the Japanese ousted the Vichy administration and replaced it with the Japanese-backed government of the Empire of Vietnam, headed by Trần Trọng Kim.

Governor General Jean Decoux wrote in his memoirs A la barre de l'Indochine that about a million northerners had starved to death.

[citation needed] The Viet Minh successfully directed public resentment and encouraged the peasants to seize the rice granaries of the occupation powers.

[8] Ho Chi Minh, in his Proclamation of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September 1945, would refer to the famine and quote a figure of 2 million deaths.