ABSTRACT
This chapter describes Vietnam’s changing socio-economic landscape, behind the rapid development which an observer characterizes as “nothing short of amazing”. This chapter offers a brief sketch of Vietnam’s recent economic development. The sketch then shifts to an examination of the changes through Doi Moi reforms that are most relevant to the farmers: cooperative mode of agricultural production, its transformation, and its eventual termination by the early 1990s. The chapter argues that the changes restored the families as the principal agent of production and other activities in rapidly commercializing agriculture. It calls attention to these farmers’ increasing contact with two capital goods for agriculture, land, and agrochemicals, as they became independent decision-makers away from the sway of the cooperatives.
