ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a wider perspective on the difficulties encountered in implementing agrarian policies in North Vietnam. A detailed examination of the institutional and incentive structures within which peasants in North Vietnamese cooperatives operated during the 1970s may be found elsewhere. In sharp distinction to the French colonial government, the leadership believed that the economic development should be based upon Vietnamese national independence. The Vietnamese have argued for a long time that one fundamental aspect of their Revolution was that the transition from colonialism and 'feudalism' to socialism would take place without the country having to go through a capitalist stage. From a comparative perspective, Vietnamese experiences with agricultural producer cooperatives appear highly conditioned by a number of interrelated factors. Agriculture remained dominated by rice mono-culture. Francesca Bray provides an accessible and thought-provoking discussion of the different technical conditions under which northwest European and wet-rice based societies have tended to develop.
