Leaving the Rice Field
Thuy Ho, Department of Geography, Indiana University
Abstract: Leaving the Rice Field is a documentary adaptation of my research on contract farming and cooperatives models in the rice sector of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta. Data collection was conducted between May and July 2023 in three provinces, namely An Giang, Kien Giang, and Ca Mau, in the “rice bowl” of Vietnam. This documentary features the story of a young female migrating worker and her left-behind family, as well as other villagers of the Vinh Thuan district in the Kien Giang province. Kien Giang is located in the downstream coastal subregion of the Mekong Delta, the “salinity zone”, where local populations have been grappling with freshwater scarcity for rice growing and salinity intrusion due to intensive shrimp farming. The water-related conflicts have become more challenging under changes of climatic conditions such as unexpected and prolonged rainfalls and droughts. In addition, the agricultural restructuring policies implemented by the Vietnamese government exacerbate the water-related conflicts and produce further environmental precarity for the rural population
Leaving the Rice Field sheds light on how local farmers struggle with indebtedness, water conflicts, and labor shortages after entering contractual arrangements with the agribusiness firms under cooperative models. The documentary also explores the reasons why young adults migrate to urban areas to make a living, leaving their children and the elderly behind. Under the changing climatic conditions and water-related conflicts, farming can no longer provide a decent livelihood for many rural people, particularly young people, who have limited access to land and production resources. Those young people have no other option than leaving their villages to make a living in urban areas.
This documentary links with my broader research that examines the environmental consequences brought by the state’s agricultural restructuring policies in An Giang, Ca Mau, and Kien Giang provinces in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta since the early 2000s. The state’s agricultural restructuring policies have created environmental changes that challenge the state-designed cooperative model, which was initially implemented for maintaining agricultural exports and national food security. In their daily language and policy documents, government officials attribute the increases in saltwater intrusion from the coastal areas to climate change. They blame climate change and hydroelectric dams upstream of the Mekong River outside the country’s territory for reduced freshwater flows from the upper regions. The government thus only acknowledges the consequences of environmental engineering that occur outside the country. Such environmental stressors have made the livelihoods of people in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta harder and have led to increased outmigration.
When rice is unable to survive next to surrounding shrimp ponds, rice farmers have to switch to vegetable instead of shrimp farming, as the cost for shrimp raising is too high for them.
Compared to the whole Kien Giang province, the Vinh Thuan district, as the setting in this documentary, has experienced a particularly high outmigration rate during the last years. According to the Vinh Thuan People’s Committee, 2,049 people—14% of the total district population—moved to industrial zones in big cities in early 2022, while the outmigration rate for the whole province was only 1.7% (GSO, 2022). A majority of people who left Vinh Thuan were young adults unable to find jobs in the rural areas. Although all the characters featured in the documentary are from Vinh Thuan, their stories would not sound unfamiliar to people who reside in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta region. The shrinking and sinking Delta is burdened by labor shortages in agriculture, with the elderly and children left behind by outmigrants. Migrant women particularly face the pressure of managing their work and life at their new destinations while navigating their long-distance care for left-behind families. Moreover, there is little prospect of returning for the outmigrants, who would be landless, unemployed, and deskilled in agriculture.
While local authorities attribute migration to the increasing changes of climatic conditions and the environment, ironically, agricultural restructuring policies promoted by the Vietnamese government themselves produce environmental precarity and further drive young people away from rural areas (Ho and Shattuck, 2024). Since the 2010s, the Vietnamese government has promoted a vertically integrated model of agricultural cooperatives and contract farming with the goal of growing more rice for exports while maintaining national food security. The government expected the combined contract farming and cooperatives model to increase farmers’ access to input materials, credits, loans, and output markets while aggregating smallholding farmers for large-scale farming. Although in some cases the strength of collective organizations under contract farming has enabled farmers to increase their incomes (Tran et al., 2022), in most other cases, contract farming has resulted in complex forms of dispossession of land, livelihoods, and generational knowledge (UNIDROIT, 2014; Nguyen et al., 2019; Hoang, 2021; Ho and Shattuck, 2024). These stressors raise questions about the effectiveness of farmers’ cooperatives in facilitating contract farming and addressing farmers’ conflicts over resources.
Although the Vietnamese government frames outmigration as an adaptation strategy to climate change and poverty reduction, the aforementioned agricultural restructuring policies pose a further main cause of outmigration that the government is reluctant to recognize as such. For example, in the study areas, the government has repeatedly promoted the conversion of freshwater crops to brackish water crops, specifically through infrastructure development that enabled shrimp farming over freshwater crops, which has exacerbated water-related conflicts. For the individuals in the documentary, moving away to cities for other income sources has thus become an alternative to farming in such hardship. The local authorities admit, though not explicitly in the documentary, that “[they] know what the reasons are, the climate is just one of them” for the high outmigration rate of young people.
In addition, contractual arrangements have been unsuccessful in lifting the market constraints for farmers as well as improving their income, due to the lack of trust among firms and farmers as contract parties and thus their low commitment (Hoang, 2021; Ho and Shattuck, 2024). As exemplified in the documentary, price fluctuations are one of the most popular reasons leading to contract breaches by contracting companies. Agribusiness cooperatives’ lack of commitment often indebts farmers and thus diminishes their trust in companies. The uneven power relations between agribusiness firms and farmers allow agribusiness firms to easily shift the production and environmental risks to farmers. There are also challenges in the self-organization of cooperatives, particularly the farmers’ lack of trust in cooperative leadership and limited management skills of cooperative leaders, as reported by the cooperative leader in the documentary. The ineffective combination of cooperatives and contract farming has yet to achieve its goal of improving livelihoods for smallholder farmers in the Mekong Delta area. Moving away from agriculture and rural life seems unavoidable for the youngsters there.
Being the country’s “rice bowl”, the Mekong Delta has contributed 95% of rice, 80% of aquaculture, and 65% of fruit to the country’s exports in the last several years (GSO, 2022). Yet, the Delta can no longer secure a decent life for its farmers and their children. Farming and agriculture-related jobs have become a less preferable option for young people. Mekong Delta residents, especially youths, hope to improve their living conditions by pursuing non-farming jobs. They show an aversion to agriculture. However, not everyone who leaves their hometown can start a successful life in the cities. Some are forced to move from place to place in the cities as their jobs are unstable. Some choose to move back and forth between the cities and their hometown. Some of them wish to return to their home for good. Yet, making a good life from agriculture seems no longer easy. The stories in this documentary demonstrate the impacts of the structural constraints implemented by agricultural policies in the rise of climate change, particularly through crop conversion plans and contract farming models. The government should recognize these constraints and provide easier access to farming resources to secure the livelihoods of existing and future generations of the Mekong Delta farmers.
An abandoned rice plot (middle) impacted by salinity of a shrimp farm (left). The vegetable plot (right) could survive the harvest as salinity did not reach a damaging level.