Part 1 of 4
Dr Trần Quang Minh
Chữ viết tắt:
RVN : Republic of VietNam (Viet Nam Cong Hoa)
THE ACCELERATED MIRACLE RICE PRODUCTION PROGRAM (AMRPP)
“The Accelerated Miracle Rice Production Program” (AMRPP) was the third major MLRAD program that I was directly involved in. Even though the MLRAD had been implementing at least two dozens agricultural development programs in the nine agricultural sectors that it managed, this program was by far the most important agricultural development program of the Second Republic of Viet Nam because of its magnitude in term of men, money, and materials devoted to its implementation as well as its extension in every corner of the country.
As anyone who lives in Viet Nam would attest, rice is the most important component of the South Vietnamese economy as, for that matter, the economy of most other developing Asian countries. Rice is also the most vital element of the VietNamese livelihood and an enduring feature of the Vietnamese culture as one would encounter its manifestation in our literature, art, folklore, festivities, and daily activities since time immemorial. In other words, no one could deny the key role that rice plays in the whole SVN economy.
Of course, after the spectacularly swift completion of the massive Land-To-The-Tiller land reform program, it would not be hard to think that the next logical step in President Thieu’s rural social revolution would be the various agricultural production programs to improve the farmers’ livelihood. And it was understandable that the government realized also at a time of diminished foreign assistance that a major endeavor towards food self-sufficiency was mandatory. If rice export, discontinued since 1964 because of the disruption by an escalating war, resumed in earnest then it would be most beneficial for the nation building. There was no way that South Viet Nam could afford to import an average of 435,000 metric tons of rice (equivalent of 900,000 MT of paddy) for its yearly consumption as during the height of the American involvement in the Viet Nam War. During the period from 1966 to 1972, SVN had to import 2,600,000 metric tons of rice to satisfy its population’s need, mostly from the USA. So, President Thieu considered that it was a matter of foremost and great urgency for our country to achieve rice self-sufficiency. He stressed this policy in all his major pronouncements.
Background
In 1972, the MLRAD was tasked with drafting a Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan for President Thieu to take it along when he would meet with President Nixon at their Summit Meeting early the following year in San Clemente at the Western White House on March, 1973. President Thieu was seeking President Nixon’s assistance in launching his country’s agriculture-based economic development after the monumental success of his signature land reform rural social revolution that practically won the insurgency war for our side. It was no surprise to anyone in the country that President Thieu shifted his focus now to agricultural development to rebuild his country’s agrarian society since it had been devastated by a protracted and vicious war of aggression by North Viet Nam. Remember that at the time roughly 65 % of the South Vietnamese or 11,000,000 people still lived on agriculture.
President Thieu, at the first anniversary of the LTTTP in Long Xuyen in 1971, proclaimed that his Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan centered on the following three urgent objectives:
1.To satisfy national consumption demands of essential commodities,
2.To increase the living standard of rural people,
3.To decrease imports and increase exports.
In his speech in front of 5000 local farmers who received land ownership titles, he announced the following three main points of his administration economic policy:
1.Economic development must be carried out in parallel with the realization of social justice.
2.Together with the social justice and progress, economic development must create a new society in which every citizen becomes well-to-do and the middle class makes up the majority of the people.
3.Once all the citizens are well provided for and properly fed, the effort to make the nation self-sufficient, especially in foodstuffs would be achieved. From there, the agricultural sector, which forms the basis of the economy, should be able to provide amply all the raw materials needed for the development of light industries that will jump start the industrialization and modernization process of the whole country.
As I remember, even though the drafting of the plan was ordered by Minister Cao Van Than, his current Director General of Agriculture Pham Huy Lan allowed the work to languish at the nine different Directorates. Even though Minister Than brought in one of his fellow University of Pittsburgh economics classmates as Assistant Minister to help direct the effort for a while, it was still slow going and very inadequate. It was understandable since this was the first time something of this magnitude had been tackled at the MLRAD.
I think the problem was mainly lack of cooperation and resentment of the MLRAD entrenched bureaucracy. The former Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) was one of the oldest portfolio of our government and it had been always run by the old French-trained and Vietnamese-trained agricultural technocrats clique. Minister Than was the first American-trained economist and lawyer, and thus non-agriculturist, who was put in charge of the portfolio to carry out President Thieu’s landmark Land To The Tiller land reform program. Minister Than was one of the President’s best and brightest individuals of the Specialists Group working in his inner circle at the Palace. I was also a young American-trained veterinarian, brought in to the third-highest position as Director of Cabinet bypassing quite a few people with seniority. As a result, a lot of leading rank and file officials in the Ministry showed a palpable resentment, reticence, lack of cooperation, discontent, and disinterest. So the massive plan formulation was performed perfunctorily and with constant delays not to mention with dubious quality.
In South Viet Nam, if people chose to do the minimum, not much was accomplished or if it was completed the quality of the work proved so poor that it was worthless. On top of that, a coordinated, cohesive, coherent, workable, and detailed implementation plan encompassing all nine agricultural sectors had never been done before by our ministry to acceptable international standard to secure foreign aid. So nobody knew exactly how to craft such a plan.
That was when I came in the picture. In mid 1972, MLRAD Minister Cao Van Than appointed me Director General of Agriculture (DGA) with two important and urgent tasks: 1) Finalize the drafting of the Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan; 2) Speed up the implementation of the nascent Miracle Rice Production Program to achieve food self-sufficiency at the earliest time possible as ordered by the President.
It’s worth mentioning that I was shifted from a staff function of Chief Staff (Director of Cabinet), a third-highest-ranking official in the Ministry to a line function of Director General of Agriculture, a sixth-highest-ranking official. But this organization was the biggest entity in our entire government with its nine directorates in Saigon and local offices in four Military Regions, and forty four provinces up and down the whole country, employing some 20,000 full-time people with variable numbers of temporary employees recruited for different programs:
1) Directorate of Crops Production and Protection;
2) Directorate of Livestock Production and Protection;
3) Directorate of Fisheries,
4) Directorate of Forestry;
5) Directorate of Farm Mechanization;
6) Directorate of Irrigation;
7) Directorate of Farm Cooperatives and Farmers’ Union;
8) Directorate Agricultural Extension;
9) Directorate of Agricultural Research.
My first focus was to complete the drafting of a good workable Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan in time for the President to take with him along with other plans of his administration to the Summit Meeting with President Nixon. It turned out to be a monumental task for me because after reading the disparate drafts that the nine Directorates submitted to the Directorate General of Agriculture for consideration, I found out that the various plans were not done with the same format, with any consistency and cohesiveness. They were disparate plans written with different language styles by different people, with different degrees of readiness and levels of quality, without plans of implementation and without many local or regional references. So, I made the important decision to do this work myself with a central team of planners at the DGA with inputs gathered from the nine directorates and in the fields in the same format. The big problem was that there was no such team in existence and I had no experience in this endeavor.
In the old days, whenever I wanted to learn something fast I always turned to my American advisers to pick their brains. And in those days, South Viet Nam was blessed with the biggest USAID set up overseas. There were hundreds of experts in all fields of human endeavor with their vast experience, having worked all over the developing world for decades. The best and the brightest development officials gathered in Saigon to assist us. And all we had to do was to call them and ask for whatever experts we wanted to advise us or our people.
Sometimes they went out of their way to help us. I remember on one occasion when I was Director of Cabinet, my Minister sent me to a week-long Regional FAO Meeting in Canberra, Australia, the USAID/Saigon sent Mr. Gleason who used to be an Associate (or Assistant) Director of Agriculture to accompany me there. We even roomed close together at the hotel. He spent a whole week of free time throughout the day and even late into the night to discuss with me about agriculture development: the what, the where, the how, the when, and why of this vital undertaking. I was trained in animal husbandry and veterinary medicine and knew very little about modern agricultural development in the developing world. Mr. Gleason had vast experience in this field having worked for decades all over the developing world. He was very patient in relating his valuable experience to me and in answering my probing questions as though he was anticipating my career rise and tried to groom me for important agricultural development work ahead in the service of my country and my people. As a result I was a very knowledgeable executive on agricultural development issues at whatever high level position I held in government. I had nothing but great association, pleasant working relation, and fruitful cooperation with all my American counterparts and advisers. And over the years, I had a great number of them working with me at all levels.
The case in point, when I was sent down to take over the leadership of the Directorate General of Agriculture to craft the Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan, I needed a score of graduates of different fields of agriculture to help gather data from various executives at all levels of the nine different agricultural sectors and forty four provinces on a crash basis. USAID provided me not only with the necessary fund for staffing —including loaning us secretarial staff from USAID -- for such undertaking, but also an expert on agricultural development planning, an old economic professor from Louisiana to give our team a crash course on agricultural development planning. When I met with him, he said right off the cuff, “Dr. Minh, only communist countries have five-year development plans. And have you ever heard of any of their plans worth a d--n? You are lucky if you can just plan one year ahead.” So I said, “Look, Dr. Bolton, you have to take this up with President Thieu or have your Ambassador do that or something. This matter is way above my pay grade. I was ordered by Minister Than to draft a Five-Year Plan ASAP for President Thieu to take it to President Nixon and I intend to do just that. Either you help us quick or wish me luck to find a go---mn communist five-year planner somewhere to assist us.”
And that’s how Dr. Bolton ended up giving the MLRAD a top-notched, dynamic, young planning team and working fourteen to sixteen hours a day until the wee hours we completed the massive, coherent, and detailed plan in a couple months, complete with English translation. Only one writer did the narrative to keep it homogeneous, while nine fellows gathering data and facts from the nine directorates, and another dozen individuals collecting needed facts from the provinces. Then my whole team pieced together all the pertinent data and facts according to the format laid out by Dr. Bolton. I then proceeded to translate this voluminous plan into English. It was no easy task. After I finished the job – a 10-volume plan that stacked up to a yard high -- I gave it to Dr. Bolton to assess the result of the work and to secure USAID help in printing it in English because our typists could not type English fast. This was pre-computer and pre-word-processor time. He came back the next day and said, “Dr. Minh, your plan is excellent, but your English stinks. Did they ever teach you anything at OSU?” I came back with, “Listen, I went there to study veterinary medicine not English. I cannot help it. You guys should have sent me to Harvard or Yale as I wanted years ago. Anyway, Dr. Bolton, you just have a new assignment: editing the English version of the South Viet Nam’s ‘excellent’, your words not mine, Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan. Do you want me to call Bob Sweet to amend your contract?” And so with Dr. Bolton’s editing, President Thieu had his big well-edited plan on time to go to his Summit Meeting and the DGA had an experienced and dynamic planning team.
When he bid me farewell during the dark days of April 1975 while I was at my last job as Head of the National Food Administration (NFA) and he was still my American adviser there, Dr. Bolton mused, “Dr. Minh, you know what, I still think your Five-Year Plan was your greatest legacy and if the communists are smart, they will make good use of it.” Years later after the fall of South Viet Nam on a short visit there to see for the last time my beloved dying mother, I saw evidence that they used a lot of programs in that “excellent” plan. The proletariat might be good at dictatorship, but its agricultural development planning ability stank worse than my English translation!
I will never forget my last conversation with my mom. She was in and out of coma and when she was lucid the last time, she said, “I did not tell you to come home, son. Don’t come back anymore until there is a regime change.” I reassured her, “I had to see you to thank you for everything you did for me, Mom. Don’t you dare to die on me before I am able to pay back for everything I owed you, Mom, or else I will never forgive you.” To that she said, “You have already, son.” I marveled, “How’s that, Mom.” She managed to murmur before drifting back into her coma, “By living up to all my hopes and dreams. That’s all I ever wanted from you, son. And nothing else.” My Mom was bitter to the very end about the communist taking over our country and confiscating all my Dad’s businesses (his farmers’ co-op, his rural bank, his feed mill, his two big poultry farms, his hatcheries) and properties (his mansion, his sugar cane plantation, his cars, trucks, tractors).
THE ACCELERATED MIRACLE RICE PRODUCTION PROGRAM (Part II)
Main Focus
The MLRAD’s Secretariat General did not have to change a word of the DGA’s Plan when it reached there. With the planning out of the picture, I was able now to devote full time to the ongoing implementation of the major development programs of that plan.
At this point, I would like to tell you how I went about overcoming quickly all the difficulties stemming from the usual turf war in any South Vietnamese organization. At that time the South Vietnamese society was a pretty fragmented society with animosity between Southerners, Northerners, Central Vietnamese akin to the Yankees and Rebels in this country years ago, resentment between French-trained, American-trained, and local-trained technocrats, friction between old and young generations, suspicion between different religious backgrounds, competition between various political allegiances… Ambassador Bunker always commented negatively on this fact in his reports.
Let me tell you how a thirty-four-year old, American-trained, Buddhist Southerner led with success and pizzazz the biggest organization in the South Vietnamese government. When Minister Than asked me if I wanted to be the DGA chief because Mr. Pham huy Lan was too old and not very dynamic and the focus now was agricultural development and not land reform any more, knowing that it would be a demotion for me—going from the third to the sixth highest-ranking position in the Ministry, I said, “I served the nation at your pleasure, Mr. Minister. Wherever you think I can contribute the most, I’ll gladly comply. However, I have one favor to ask of you: I’d like to have Mr. An for my second in command.” He concurred wholeheartedly if I could somehow convince him to join me down there. Mr. Nguyen Van An was the current Deputy Secretary General, a fifth-ranking official of the Ministry with thirty years of service and also a Southern agronomist trained in-country, who enjoyed great respect and deference from the Ministry rank-and-files due to his age and length of service and who was, understandably, well-versed in the intricacies of our red tape maze. It would be a demotion for him also to be seventh-ranking under a young buck like me.
So, knowing that he loved American beer, I stopped by his house the following evening with a six-pack of Budweiser and some snack foods. While we were downing his favorite drink and gnawing on the famous Thu Duc pickled meat (nem Thu Duc) I asked him about each of the nine Directors -- most of who were much older than I was, with some as old as my father -- that I would lead: their strengths and weaknesses, their likes and dislikes, their style of leadership, their skeletons in the closet if any, and what made them tic. Then after An downed his fourth beer compared to my second, I popped my proposition, “Cu An, (respectful and endearing address Vietnamese use vis-à-vis an elderly person) the Minister wanted to put me in charge of the DGA because he promoted Lan to be Assistant Minister and named me as his replacement. I told him that I only accept the job if I could get you to help me run that behemoth. You know that the Minister, you, and I are the only Southern leaders of this entire important outfit of our government. If I could not succeed in this important assignment, the other folks would laugh their heads off at us, Southerners, and they will think that we are a bunch of incapable nincompoops. You are like my Dad, so I will give you due respect you deserve and let you pretty much manage the administrative and financial machineries and deal with the nine directors on my behalf in order for me to have all the time I need to push the implementation of the programs at the grass roots level where things are getting done and done the fastest. So what do you say?” After a short thinking pause and knowing how I performed in the Accelerated Protein Production Program and the Land To The Tiller Program earlier and realized what an important job this would be for the survival of our regime, the prosperity of our country, and the future of our people, he extended his hand for a handshake and said, “It’s a deal if you keep the American beer coming. Please, also ask the Minister to tell the Secretary General not to decrease my salary.” To that I replied with the biggest smile you ever saw because I have succeeded in overcoming the biggest hurdle at the helm of the most important organization of our government. I would be the first non-agronomist and at 35 the youngest director general in the history of the DGA.
And so with Bob Sweet bringing me my weekly supply of PX beer for An, I had a loyal and efficient Deputy Director General who effectively dealt with the labyrinthine South Vietnamese red tape, pulled a lot of strings at the Secretariat General where he came from, kept my Directors in check and in line, cooperating, and performing better than I expected, and protected my back and flanks so that I could scurry around all over the provinces to push and inspect the implementation of the myriad of the MLRAD programs because this was where the rubber met the asphalt, exactly as President Park recommended us to do to build our nation as he did so successfully with South Korea.
I overheard An, whose office was right behind mine, telling many a times some of my recalcitrant Directors over the phone to shape up when they slacked off or he could not protect them from me giving them an early retirement in order to bring in my own people, something people in position of authority like a directorship feared the most. As a result, I did not have to fire any head honchos and my DGA was performing at peak efficiency and achieved fantastic results.
Minister Than was also very good at promoting young deserving people throughout his portfolio based strictly on merit and accomplishment. The case in point: He named Pham Thanh Kham as Director of Agriculture, the most important of the 9 directorates of the DGA as this outfit implemented more than half of the myriad of agricultural sector development programs. Kham was young, dynamic, and as hard-working official at the DGA as me because he was the only one director who had put in as many overtime hours and as many travels to the far corners of our country as I had done.
I always gave my managerial people the credit of any accomplishment whether they deserved it or not and I was willing to accept the blame for any screw up from my people. I did things that no one else had done in our culture. For example, it was customary for lower echelons people to give gifts to higher echelon officials during holidays. I did just the opposite: I gave my Directors gifts during those times and any other times that I wanted to thank them for anything they did above and beyond the call of duty. My father was a very rich poultry farmer who also owned a sugar cane plantation, a rural bank, and a feed mill and I regularly drew salary from him as a technical adviser even though I had not done a whole lot of work for him as busy as I was working for the government and teaching at the college. So I could afford this. And if they or someone else gave me anything, I would divide it up to my entourage instead of keeping all for myself.
A lot of managerial people in our government had the annoying habit of coming to work late and going home early, and thus causing their employees to behave likewise, bringing disgust to people who worked hard. So, efficiency and productivity of public service suffered as a result. I put an end to that habit by ordering that the DGA employees working in the sprawling compound to assemble at 8:00 AM sharp for the daily salute to the flag complete with the national anthem playing and the entrance gate to be locked afterwards just as Minister Than did at the MLRAD compound. The gate keeper on duty would record all late comers and/or early leavers to be used for year-end performance assessment. I sealed all minor entrances and escape routes to and from that sprawling compound for ease of control of illicit incomings and outgoings. I took the unprecedented and unpopular measure to enforce my directives to impose work place discipline myself at all directorates. Thank God I did not have to do a whole lot of that because basically Vietnamese are very patriotic people and they need is strong and uncompromising leadership.
My people not only respected me but they also loved the way I ran a very taut ship and was always first to come and last to leave. When I left the DGA because President Thieu named me Vice-Minister of Agriculture, a lot them were teary eyes and some, especially An, even said that I was the best doggone DGA they ever had. I thanked An and reassured him that if I ever became Minister, he would still be my second in command because everybody seemed to think that where I would be heading next.
The number one program that I spent a lot of time and effort to push was the Accelerated Miracle Rice Production Program (AMRPP) because rice was the main staple of our people, and prior to 1964, had been our main export. We just could not import an average of 435,000 MT of rice a year, especially with the Americans pulling out. South Vietnamese people are one of the highest consumers of processed rice in the world according to FAO: 15 kg (29 lbs) per person per month or 276 kg (607 lbs) of paddy per year, probably because they eat all kinds of noodles and food products made with rice. When I was the DGA Chief, the program was already in full swing thanks to the efforts of Minister of Agriculture Ton That Trinh and later Minister of Land Reform and Agriculture Development Cao Van Than. Actually, it was Minister Trinh, a well-known French-trained agronomist and former Dean at the college where I was Department Head, who named the new high-yield varieties THAN NONG, the godfather of agriculture.
When President Thieu brought Minister Cao Van Than in to carry out the Land To The Tiller Program, his landmark land reform program, the main focus was shifted to this rural social revolution effort for a couple of years as the new name Ministry of Land Reform and Agriculture Development (MLRAD) indicated, but the momentum of the Accelerated Miracle Rice Production Program (AMRPP) was not greatly affected because our government gave a lot of priority to reach rice self-sufficiency and to resume the export of rice again as a good source of foreign exchange.
There are two main ways of increasing rice production: 1) Increase acreage of rice growing; 2) Apply modern technology to rice farming on the existing acreage of rice land. We chose the second approach due to the wartime situation. So the MLRAD opted for the strategy of using high-yield varieties of rice and the application of modern agricultural methods since this approach was faster, even though it was more expensive because it required costly agri-inputs like fertilizers and insecticides as well as farm machineries and credits. The first approach was not feasible nor practical because it required a lot of military interventions to pacify the countryside, a slow and difficult process at best, demanded a lot of farm labor which was lacking due to military draft by both sides of the conflict, and called for the kind of expenditure in money and in time, which we could not afford, for big land reclamation projects.
We needed to produce roughly 6,100,000 metric tons of rice paddy as soon as possible to cover the demand of 17,000,000 people at that time. Once that was achieved, we could resume the export of rice. In the past, “Saigon rice” was preferred the world over due to its high quality. These high-quality rice varieties were notoriously low-yield—one to two metric tons per hectare. So rice scientists in our country and throughout the world were feverishly researching to create new improved varieties of both high-yield and better eating-quality.
It’s worth opening some parentheses here to mention how South Viet Nam was one of the first countries that launched the so-called Green Revolution in Asia. In mid-1967 there was a big flood following a bad typhoon in the District of Vo Dat in Binh Tuy Province in Military Region III near Saigon that caused massive damage to the first rice crop. Since the Vo Dat valley was tucked in a secluded area, the Ministry of Agriculture under Minister Ton That Trinh agreed with USAID to try planting a newly created and introduced high-yield and short-maturation rice variety called IR-8, without fearing some untoward consequences to the country’s rice varieties should some adverse genetic or biological effect happen unexpectedly from that trial.
This new rice variety was developed by the Philippines International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) that had been set up and financed by the Ford and Rockfeller Foundations. It took very-high and prolonged negotiation between the USA and the Philippines before the Filipino government allowed six metric tons of IR-8 seeds to be sent to South Viet Nam and to be planted on some 120 ha (300 acres) of rice fields. It took no less than President Johnson’s personal intervention with President Ferdinand Marcos to circumvent Filipino law to effect that transfer. Because of late planting and lack of water in the dry season, only forty hectares (100 acres) were able to produce only a disappointing average yield of two metric tons per hectares (1,760lbs/acre), which was half of the expected average yield of that high yield strain. So the entire 80 tons of harvested IR-8 seeds were bought back from farmers and distributed to thirty rice-producing provinces to be planted in the 1968 rainy season (Summer-Fall crop).
After that, the farmers were expected to multiply the seeds themselves once they realized the profit they could make from the high yield they got. Meanwhile the Rice Service of the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) would use the USAID-provided Revolving Fund to pay for the IR-8 seeds to propagate in other rice-producing areas in the dry season (Winter-Spring crop) of 1969. As a result, the 1968-1969 planting cycle saw an official 23,373 ha (roughly 60,000 acres) of IR-8 (renamed TN-8 = Than Nong 8 by Minister Trinh) planted with an expected average yield of four metric tons per hectare (3,500 lbs/acre). I said official because we had no record as to how much TN-8 the farmers planted on their own outside the government-sponsored program, but it was substantial. This was the parting shot of the Green Revolution that would be heard throughout Asia. Of course, the communists tried their utmost best to disrupt this program that made it so hard to carry it out. But thank to the success of Pacification and specially the determination and dedication of the implementers, this program made great stride towards its goal of bringing South Viet Nam rapidly back rice self-sufficiency.
With this initial success born out of a disaster and with the valuable assistance of USAID, the MLRAD, (the renamed MoA under Minister Than), launched the Accelerated Miracle Rice Production Program, the most massive undertaking of our ministry. The next growing season of 1969-1970, saw 510,000 acres (or 204,000 ha) of high yield rice varieties planted. This acreage more than doubled again the following season of 1970-1971 with 1,130,000 acres (452,100 ha) of high yield varieties planted. Under my leadership the acreage of Miracle Rice was successively brought to 1,687,000 acres (674,740 ha) in the 1971-1972 harvest and 2,087,000 acres (835,000 ha) in the 1972-1973 harvest then finally to 2,225,000 acres (890,000 ha) in the 1973-2974 harvest. The 1974-1975 harvest season saw an estimated 2,385,000 acres (950,000 ha) planted Miracle Rice within the government program. There was no way of knowing the acreage of high yield rice planting outside the official program, but it was substantial. It is worth to note that North Viet Nam in those days was only one year behind us in planting TN-8 and any other high-yield variety as Le Duan made as big an effort to introduce them to North Viet Nam as he was adamant in wrecking our effort in the South. It was the only thing we outdid him in that stupid war.
To achieve a rapid increase of high-yield rice production like that, the DGA channeled most of its human and material resources down to the Mekong Delta, the South East Asia rice basket, where nearly 65 % of our people (or roughly 11,000,000) lived at that time and also around the few provinces near the capital of Saigon for ease of transportation of the produced staple to this main center of consumption of some 3 million people. The Mekong Delta at that time was the most secure region of our country except the remote and sparsely populated areas in about 1/3 of the provinces that harbored at most 50,000 guerillas. So a lot of agricultural development work could be carried out there.
I put all my best young NAI graduates there to run the local services, experiment stations, extension services, demonstration sites, and special projects. The great majority of the graduates of the Superior School of Agriculture, Forestry, and Animal Science (later renamed National Agriculture Institute), where I was still teaching, were recruited and employed, some as specialists in certain projects with special out-of-budget funding provided by USAID. I specifically fought for these young men’s military deferment and our government realized that their service was more valuable in the civilian sectors than in the armed forces, considering the investment our government spent in training them—all our public university training was free. The agricultural sector enjoyed this unique favor all through the war years. The graduates of draft age were drafted and trained as reserve officers, but the Ministry of Defense always transferred them back to our different organizations upon our Ministry’s request. I made it a point that, if those who were recruited for our programs did not perform well, I would not want them back in our rural revolution endeavor since this is the most vital work for the prosperity of our nation if not its survival.
The Mekong Delta also received a lot of USAID’s financial and material support in agricultural development. Many American field operators and experts in different agricultural fields were also assigned in MR IV and its provinces, especially in Can Tho City of Phong Dinh Province, the hub and heart of the Mekong Delta region. Most of the programs and projects of our Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan were found in abundance there for obvious reason.
A good portion of my life was spent in the Mekong Delta, especially in Chau Doc Province, my birth place and where my Mom’s family’s roots were planted and An Giang Province, the birth place of the Phat Gia Hoa Hao Buddhist Sect with whom I derived a lot of support due to my uncle who was a high-ranking official in their military and political organization, and Kien Giang Province where 50,000 Northern Vietnamese catholic farmers’ families were resettled by President Ngo Dinh Diem after the Geneva Accords that partitioned Viet Nam into two parts along the 17th Parallel.
My uncle was the Lower House Agriculture Chairman.
Implementation
So, how did the DGA ramp up to implement the MLRAD’s signature agricultural development program?
Rice growing was always a most arduous, time-consuming, and precise undertaking. Growing traditional rice was hard enough, but growing the new high-yield variety is doubly more demanding. But, we were blessed by having Vietnamese farmers who were very progressive, smart, patient, laborious, innovative, and adaptive. They were like Missourians of the Show Me state: you have to show them to convince them. So the preferred method of getting the farmers to switch to growing TN-8 rice was to set up demonstration plots to compare the yield of native rice and Miracle Rice side by side, preferably on farmers’ lands with work done by the co-operating farmers themselves, but with our technical assistance and agri-inputs.
Then once the farmers saw for themselves the spectacularly convincing results, which 2-3 times higher than traditional farming, we followed up with the Filipino model of Mini Rice Growing Kit used successfully in the Philippines with similar program. It consisted of a box of TN-8 seeds, N-P-K fertilizer, and Diazinon systemic insecticide with detailed instruction to grow a small plot of land for seeds that they could use in the next growing season. Our cadres visited these participating farmers on a regular basis throughout the growing season to make sure that the first trial was successful. Due to the fact that these demonstration plots were so well taken care of that some of them produced an incredible ten to eleven metric tons per hectare (almost 10,000 lbs per acre). I saw some government experiment stations sites using optimal technique under ideal conditions that were able to produce an astounding yield of fifteen metric ton per ha (13,000 lbs per acre). But, the average was 4-5 metric tons per hectares (2.2 acres). When farmers saw this kind of yield with their own eyes, even Ho Chi Minh himself could not prevent them from growing TN-8.
Rice farming was so ingrained in our rural culture that farmers through the ages had learned how to do it right by passing down generations after generations these verses or sayings of wisdom that were easy to remember. For example, the four factors that assured success of rice growing were succinctly covered in decreasing order of importance by the verse: “Nhut nuoc, nhi phan, tam can, tu giong” meaning “Firstly water, secondly fertilizer, thirdly care (or labor), fourthly seeds.” But, this was true only for traditional rice and subsistence rice farming.
For growing high-yield rice in commercial setting we needed much more than that as experimentation clearly and repeatedly had shown. So, I came up with the additional four more modern essential agri-inputs for growing new high-yield rice varieties in commercial farming in the following parallel verse to teach cadres and farmers: “Ngu thuoc, luc tien, that co, bac thi” meaning “Fifthly medicines (for plants: insecticide/fungicide/herbicide), sixthly money (farm credit), seventhly machines (farm implements and machineries), eighthly market (government rice trade policy)”. I did not fully realize the paramount importance of the government rice trade policy until the severe food crisis of 1973 happened, oddly enough, at a time when I was so sure that self-sufficiency was already achieved, and with my last job when I was put in charge of implementing the Rice Marketing Program to carry out the Ministry of Trade and Industry’s new rice trade policy under Minister Nguyen Duc Cuong.
THE ACCELERATED MIRACLE RICE PRODUCTION PROGRAM (Part III)
Water: (Nhut Nuoc)
No living thing can live without water, and rice is no exception. The average rice paddy requires 500 gallons (roughly 2,000 liters) of water to produce a pound (roughly less than ½ kg) of rice. Therefore rice growing using irrigation and drainage demands 10,000-15,000 cubic meters of water per hectare (6,000-9,000 cubic feet per acre). Upland rice requires less water—600 cubic meters per hectare (900 cubic feet per acre).
The Mekong Delta produces an excess amount of rice because it is blessed with an abundance of water from the mighty Mekong River system. South Viet Nam is the terminal end of this river, so the whole delta was generated from the silt deposit through eons. The land is very fertile. The Mekong forks into two major navigable rivers when it reaches South Viet Nam then breaks up again into nine smaller branches before dumping its silt-laden water load into the South China Sea. That’s why in Viet Namese we call the Mekong River Song Cuu Long or the Nine-Dragon River.
Traditionally there are two growing seasons in the South: the monsoon, wet or rainy season also called Summer-Fall harvest from May to October; the dry season or Winter-Spring harvest from November to April of the following year. However, with short-maturing, new high-yield rice varieties that mature only in 90-100 days and irrigation that makes water available all the time, the seasons blur with year round planting possible in many areas in proximity to the rivers or the irrigation canals. Rainy season growing depending on “sky water” is more precarious due to the ever-present threat of destructive and disruptive flood caused by typhoons.
The vast and flat Mekong Delta is crisscrossed by a complex canal system built throughout the ages that diverts river water to remote lands or drains stagnant acid water from land-locked distant areas. It provides transportation by sampans or boats in areas devoid of rural roads. The Mekong Delta has some 4,000 miles of natural and man-made waterways big and small at that time.
During the dry season, farmers use irrigation from man-powered or mechanical pumps to bring river or canal or even well water into their fields, especially those located on water-deficient areas (dry lands, remote areas far from waterways, and high lands).
Our Directorate of Farm Irrigation was doing a superb job of water management including water conservation. Old canals had to be improved, new canals had to be dug, and water rights had to be established. The right kind of water pumps had to be used. Since water is the most essential element of rice farming, farmers had to be constantly trained by our farm water management experts.
2. Fertilizer: (Nhì Phân)
Fertilizer is the food of any plant. We can use natural fertilizer like nutrients in the silt that the river deposits in flooded rice fields every year. On the other hand farmers also make good use of human and large or small animals’ wastes (urine and manure of pig, cattle, water buffaloes, chicken, ducks) or even algae and legumes. This is appropriate for traditional farming using native rice strains especially at subsistence level, but totally inadequate for commercial farming using very demanding nitrogen-responsive high-yield new varieties.
Chemical fertilizer, usually of a mixture containing nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in various proportions depending on the soil analysis of where it is used, is mandatory for growing new high-yield varieties to achieve maximal production. Its timely, adequate, and appropriate use is essential for successful commercial high-yield rice farming. Farmers had to be taught by our cadres about all of this on a relentless basis and in a massive scale every year.
Since one pound of N-P-K fertilizer is required to produce ten to fifteen pounds of rice, to bring about the full potential of high-yield varieties, it is recommended to use 250 kg of N-P-K fertilizer per hectare (220 lbs of N-P-K per acre). Most farmers could not afford that expense, especially in the beginning of the program. So they used different lesser amounts. Also there was the perennial question of availability and affordability of these commodities at a time of raging war. Chemical fertilizer was an imported agri-input, making its price high unless it was subsidized. The government chose to subsidize this commodity to increase rice production at the fastest pace. On the hand, its availability was low unless the farmers were situated close to the commercial agri-input depots, usually located in cities or towns (both province and district) or farmers co-ops’ sites. The easy access of this vital and costly commodity was always a controlling factor for the Miracle Rice program implementers. This fact was in the back of the mind of every official responsible for the implementation of this program at the grassroots level.
The Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) devoted an important portion of the government foreign exchange to the importation of fertilizer: More than 200,000 metric tons were imported in 1967, 230,000 metric tons in 1968, 483,000 metric tons in 1969, and 502,000 metric tons in 1970. More would be needed in succeeding years as the hectareage of Miracle Rice sharply increased. Just these four above-mentioned amounts of fertilizers could have theoretically produced more than 21,200,000 metric tons of rice in these four years if properly applied.
This was why the DGA of the MLRAD had been putting forth relentless efforts to develop agri-input depots by the private sector merchants, farms’ co-ops, and farmers’ unions closer and closer to the end-users, which were Miracle Rice farmers. Learning from my past experience in successfully promoting the private sector participation in our Accelerated Protein Production Program in 1967, I had numerous meetings with local private sector investors and the banking system from rural banks to agricultural development banks, and commercial banks, as well as farms’ co-ops and unions in all the sixteen provinces in the Mekong Delta. I told my service chiefs to do likewise and I would not fault them in this effort as officials were reluctant to deal with the private sector for fear of being accused of connivance or collusion. I taught them how to do it right in an open and public manner with the involvement of the local legislative people.
The distribution of fertilizer as other vital agri-inputs had to be turned over to the commercial private sector and farmers’ organizations to be more efficient and economical or free of graft and corruption. That was why in 1967, the Tenant Farmers’ Association distributed thirty per cent of the fertilizers imported that years to their members and more in subsequent years.
Our Directorate of Crops Production and Protection (DCPP) and Directorate of Agricultural Extension (DAE) were consumed in this priority program as in other programs in training farmers about the ins and outs of modern farming. We were blessed to have two dynamic and knowledgeable thirtyish Directors in charge of these Directorates and they were working at least as hard as I was in propelling this AMRPP in overdrive. There was never any rest for the weary. These guys were always a step ahead of me, especially Mr. Pham Thanh Kham, the DCPP Director, which was not easy to do.
3. Labor: (Tam Cần)
Rice farming, especially high-yield rice farming, is a most labor-intensive, back-breaking, and exacting agri-business undertaking. No wonder one farmers’ saying loudly proclaims, “Mot hat thoc vang chin hat mo hoi” meaning “One golden rice paddy grain requires nine drops of sweat.” And sweating the farmers do all day long, sometimes way into the night during certain times. It’s an early-dawn-until-late-dusk business with few welcome short breaks in between. A modern farmer must be an agronomist, an economist, a meteorologist, a businessman, a farm equipment mechanic, and a laborer lumped into one.
Not only that, it’s also the most risky business endeavor since it’s subjected to so many unpredictable vagaries of nature: flood, drought, typhoon, untimely rain, infestation by insects, infection by diseases, ravage by pests (birds, rodents, land crabs, snails, fish). In war time, damage could be wrought by churning military amphibious vehicles and wading troops.
For labor, farmers first rely on family’s and relatives’ labor during peak labor requirement times (land preparation, seedling planting, harvest time, insect control spraying, weeding). Wife, kids, parents are enlisted into the chores. Time-sensitive activities required hired labor. Farmers do a lot of exchange labor with friends, neighbors, colleagues, and relatives. Of course, if farmers are well-off they could have draft animals like cattle (oxen, water-buffaloes) for land preparation and transportation.
Human labor was always at premium and constituted a limiting factor in war time due to military draft by both sides of the conflict. Americans always complained about the high desertion rate of our armed forces. But, like most armies, ours was also a peasant-based army. During peak-labor time, our soldiers did come home to help their parents with urgent farming chores. Fighting and killing enemies, even sworn ones had to wait. This happened with both sides. If Ho Chi Minh with all the cruelty of his coercive and oppressive machinery could not prevent this infraction by his guerillas, there was no way that Nguyen Van Thieu with the compassion of his religion and the humanity of his regime could do any better. It was a matter of survival of the family. I saw this all the time in my wanderings in the boonies and a lot of our officers at all levels were empathetic to the need. I often saw whole platoons or companies of RF (Regional Forces) or PF (Popular Forces) teamed up to help farmers doing harvest chores as their civic actions in order to have everybody stick together as a unit in case of need.
To alleviate this labor constraint, the government promoted mechanization of farming operations at different stages. High yield rice farming required a lot of labor-saving machines due to the double or triple or quadruple yield and increased amount of work.
Our Directorate of Farm Co-operatives and Farmers’ Unions did their utmost to organize farmers with a view to:
1) capitalize and maximize farmers’ labor and resources;
2) increase their bargaining power in buying their products and selling their crops;
3) minimize their expenses on acquisition of labor-saving equipment. Even our Rural Development Cadres (RDC’s) sometimes helped out in their heart-and-mind-winning efforts.
I also saw local former landowners who invested in procuring farm machineries for hire or for rent with their compensation money as their new lucrative money-making enterprise that farmers loved instead of hated.
4. Seeds: (Tứ Giống)
South Viet Nam had hundreds of good quality rice varieties famous all over the world commonly known overseas as “Saigon Rice”, but yield was low (one to two metric tons per hectare or two and a half acres) and maturation was long (five to seven months).
There were long grain, short grain, and medium grain, slender grain and round grain varieties. There were aromatic and non-aromatic strains. There were white, red, purple, and charcoal species. There were sticky and non-sticky types. There were short- stemmed rice varieties growing in high lands, and twelve-foot long-stemmed rice varieties floating in deeply flooded fields. There were salty-water rice kinds that grow in the proximity of estuaries and acid-stagnant-water rice kinds that thrive in land-locked fields. There were some 800 different local varieties of rice with suggestive, descriptive, and weird names.
But the main effort of the MLRAD was to launch the Green Revolution (growing the high-yield varieties developed by IRRI scientists to stamp out hunger in the third world) on a large scale and at a rapid pace to increase rice production. The goal was to gradually replace wherever possible the native strains of rice by high-yield and short-maturation new varieties of rice. The first focus was on quantity production until self-sufficiency and then later, after this was achieved, we would work on quality production.
The first high-yield rice variety, developed by Dr. Chang, an IRRI rice geneticist, was IR-8, later renamed TN-8 (Than Nong 8) by MoA Minister Ton That Trinh after the patron saint of Viet Namese agriculture, Than Nong. TN-8 was followed in short order by TN-5 (more suitable for deep water field due to its long stem), TN-20, TN-22 (better cooking and eating quality), TN73-1, TN73-2 (more insect-resistant, shorter maturation)
TN-8 had many shortcomings: the amylose content is too high (28 %) making the cooked rice too hard to swallow when cold; the plant stem is too short, thus unsuitable for deeply flooded rice field; the grain is too short and too big unlike the long slender grain of expensive rice varieties that the export market loves. And it’s not aromatic as some of the premium quality rice species are.
Although IR-8 was poor for eating because it got hard too soon when it was cold, it was wonderful for making oodles of noodles—fine noodle, small noodle, medium noodle, large noodle, flat noodle, round noodle, sheet noodle. The noodle strands were strong and resilient. They did not break off and get mushy in the soup. And Viet Namese--Northern, Southern, Central--love to eat noodles. They eat noodles in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, and even far into the night. They eat noodle appetizers, noodle entrees, and noodle desserts. And Vietnamese can reel off the names of at least three dozen noodle dishes they eat. Just Pho soups alone have no fewer than a dozen variants. When I worked with my people late into the night I had to take them to the Pho shops at midnight or else they would not volunteer to stay on after quitting time or could not last until the wee hours to complete all kinds of projects in time or, more importantly, on time because they did not get any overtime pay of any kind. These young technocrats – most of them were my former students – worked above and beyond the call of duty because they liked, admired, and respected their boss. All I could say was that noodles played a big role in getting our government programs moving along at a breakneck pace in those days wherever I went and whatever I did.
Our Rice Service in the DCPP headed by a bright young agronomist and rice specialist named Tran Van Dat, Minister Trinh’s favorite student, who did a superb job in testing and experimenting with new rice seeds and in setting up spectacular demonstration plots to train cadres and farmers through its many research stations and training centers. They came up with a lot of ways of optimizing and maximizing yield of the new varieties as no one knew how they fared in actual growing conditions in commercial setting. I helped to send Dat to the UC-Davis to get his PhD in rice agronomy by intervening with Minister Than because the bureaucracy wanted to send someone else. Dat later became an FAO rice expert manager of world renown.
Our Directorate of Research under the capable and learned leadership of Dr. Thai Cong Tung also contributed immensely in the seed acclimatization and multiplication effort, not only rice seeds but many other crop seeds in its many research stations throughout the country.
These technocrats were instrumental in coming up with what, where, when, and how we could plant two, three, even four crops a year with the least cost and the most chance of success, the lowest risk, and the highest yield. They were able to show for all to see that we could produce an astounding fifteen metric tons of rice paddy per hectare under optimal and ideal conditions that they came up with. It was mind-boggling to think about the possibility of modern scientific farming.
5. Insecticides/Fungicides/Herbicides: (Ngũ Thuốc)
For plants, insecticides and fungicides are like medicines to human or animals. Bugs, and Viet Nam had buckets of them, did bug the new non-resistant Miracle Rice plants to death. Sometimes, there were epidemics of certain insect infestations -- especially when the import of insecticides was delayed for some reasons -- that caused widespread and extensive damage to rice crops in biblical proportion, which necessitated coordinated efforts by all concerned to stamp them out and to contain the damage.
Our extension cadres were performing a superb job of training our farmers on managing the Miracle Rice strains and they spent a lot of time in the boonies learning how to do this since everything was new to all of us also. As a college professor, I was big on training people: our agricultural cadres at different provincial services, Rural Development (RD) cadres of the village government, farmers’ coops and farmers’ unions people, and most importantly, progressive farmers. Once farmers saw that their neighbors achieve the kind of mind-boggling yield that these progressive had, the tedious struggle of agricultural modernization was won at that hamlet. We then moved out to nearby hamlets like a drop of oil on the water surface.
Our crop protection specialists at the Crop Protection Service under the DCPP were always on the lookout everywhere for first signs of trouble. Insect infestation was more effectively dealt with preventive measures and early control than trying to deal with it when it was widespread and full-blown. They found out that TN-8, unlike later varieties or our native rice, was very susceptible to tough Viet Namese insects. Some problems had to be dealt with at night under torch light to be effective because if we waited until daylight it would be too late because the larvae already penetrated the rice plant.
On the other hand, heavy use of chemical fertilizer also promoted rapid growth of weeds in the rice fields. This necessitated mandatory use of herbicides. Hand picking was totally unsatisfactory mainly due to lack of labor. This task was essential to reduce fertilizer waste and to optimize paddy production.
Therefore, to assure success of this type of rice farming, we had to import very expensive, highly health-hazardous, greatly environment-degrading insecticides and herbicides and other minor plant protection chemicals. Sometimes overzealous and ignorant farmers misused these chemicals that resulted in severe problems such as the catastrophic destruction of fish and snails that were part of their diet and other living creatures that were links in the long food chain. This necessitated more training and regulatory works to minimize the adverse side effects to the environment and people’s health.
The MTI and the MLRAD considered these agri-inputs availability top priority. They worked closely to make sure that progressive farmers of Miracle Rice had easy and timely access to these necessary commodities at the usual private sector outlets of NPK fertilizer close to end-users. Meanwhile, our government worked hard to facilitate in-country manufacturing and compounding of these products by local commercial outfits. As I remember, we were promoting biodegradable products more friendly to environment and humans. In 1969, $450,000 worth of insecticides were imported and in 1970, that figure doubled to $900,000.
Our government made a significant step in reducing import by helping the private sector set up the first environment-friendly biodegradable systemic insecticide (Diazinon) manufacturing plant in country in 1972. The second plant producing another similar biodegradable systemic insecticide (Furadan) was built in 1973. Three domestic fertilizer blending plants were constructed, two in 1972, one in 1973.
6. Money or Credit: (Lục Tiền)
Any business enterprise requires credit and commercial rice farming, especially high-yield rice variety that requires costly inputs, is no exception. Yet our farmers, just as farmers anywhere else in the third world, made up the poorest segment of our society, eking out a subsistence living with zero collateral. High-yield rice growing necessitates relatively high cash outlay to be successful, which usually amounted to 25 % of the value of the crop produced. Traditionally, tenant farmers got credits or advances from landlords or loan sharks at exorbitantly high interest rate. But after the land reform program they were now landowners themselves and needed other sources of credit.
Since farming is a risky proposition at best due to unpredictable and uncontrollable vagaries of nature, usual commercial sources of credit like commercial banks are out of reach for farmers. But oddly enough, from our experience, farmers were more worthy as borrowers than other folks! My father told me that his Rural Bank in Lai Thieu District hardly lost any loan money from farmers because he always gave them a second chance, a strategy he called “nurturing the debtor to erase the debt” (Nuoi no de tru no).
To fill this void, special governmental or quasi-governmental sources of credit had to be made available to farmers close to their villages, particularly during the start-up phase of their business enterprise of growing Miracle Rice. Thus, national credit unions, agricultural development banks, and rural banks were born. The original National Credit Unions (Quoc Gia Nong Tin Cuoc) set up by the Diem Regime were inadequate. So with loans from the Asian Development Bank, our Agricultural Development Banks (ADB = Ngan Hang Phat Trien Nong Nghiep) were developed. Still that was not satisfactory nor sufficient. Therefore, the rural banks, created according to the Filipino model in order to mobilize private capital, were set in district towns closer to farmers. Even though half of the money of these private banks came from the ADB and the training was done by the ADB, these banks operated under the new banking law without interference from the government. The ADB supervised their operations to make sure they did business according to the law. These banks were more responsive to the needs of farmers. The Village Administrative Committee (Hoi Dong Xa) even played a role in processing the loan applications of farmers.
Farms’ Co-operatives and Farmers’ Union also provided credit to their members according to their means. Agricultural credits were made available to needy farmers on an increasing basis for a wide range of farming and trading activities.
The amounts loaned showed how fast the program was growing: 1968: VN$4.13 billion, 1969: VN$4.62 billion, 1970: VN$6 billion, 1971: VN$10.067 billion (to 170,611 farmers and fishermen), 1972: VN$18.924 billion (to 202,714 farmers and fishermen), 1973: VN$26.4 billion (projected), 1974: VN$28.7 billion (projected) by the Agricultural Development Bank. Small non-collateralized loans averaged VN$25,000 or less, medium loans VN$50,000 or less, large loans VN$500,000 or less. Forty percent of this low interest credit was earmarked for rice production and three quarters of these loans were made to small farmers without collateral. By the end of the year more than three fourths of the outstanding loans were repaid in full.
There were also forty eight rural banks loaning VN$3.35 billion to 23,818 farmers and fishermen. These banks were very popular with our farmers because they were set up at the district level much closer to the farmers. The owners of these banks were usually people who did business with farmers or landowners who received large compensation money from the government and wanted to invest in another line of business. Under the new Rural Banking Law, the investors didn’t have to pay any kinds of taxes, fees, and interests for five years. My father, who owned a rural bank with his poultry business partner, said that farmers were the best clients he ever had because they were very reliable. They would pay back every penny they owed unless there were calamities, and even then, if given a second chance they would make it up. Farmers who could not have access to the above-mentioned source of funding were still able to secure private funding through traditional local lenders (grocery owners, local rice merchants, wealthy people…) at a higher rate, though not as high as before land reform.
7. Farm Machineries: (Thất Cơ)
Modern commercial farming requires high degree of mechanization of farm operations to reduce the cost of production, especially when the production is so high as with high-yield rice and to make up for the dearth of human and animal labor due to the constant war demands on labor.
To encourage mechanization, the MTI made its scarce foreign exchange reserve available as a top priority basis for the importation by the private sector of a large variety of farm machineries. I saw all sizes of tractors for dry field plowing and tilling of soil. Farmers also used small Japanese and Taiwanese tillers suitable for wet fields and even planters of seedlings. And for the first time, during harvest time one could see all kinds of mobile harvesters, transportable dryers, threshers, automatic millers, baggers parking along the highways to harvest and process the paddy. But the machine that we saw everywhere in our countryside was the water pumps. There were all types and all sizes of water pumps. We imported 40,000 water pumps of all sizes in 1967, 174,000 small gasoline engines in 1969, and 186,000 similar engines in 1970 and 1971. These machines not only were used for irrigation and draining of rice fields, but they were used also to motorize sampans, and boats of all sizes with some clever tinkering thanks to Viet Namese ingenuity. Water transportation in vast roadless remote areas of the Mekong Delta was godsend. In 1970, the Ministry of Economy (MoE) earmarked US$15,000,000 for the importation of farm machineries of all types. Last but not least, we imported big quantities of small farm implements like hand insecticide sprayers and herbicide applicators for the control of insects and weeds in millions of acres.
Our Directorate of Farm Mechanization was intimately involved in the development and promotion of all farm operations’ mechanization at all levels. They trained our local cadres, farm co-ops, and farmers’ unions, most of the time in collaboration with foreign manufacturers in the use, maintenance, and repair of all this farm machinery. They also did studies and research in optimizing and maximizing the use of mechanical means to complement and supplement farm labor. Our mechanical engineers invented quite a few simple machines themselves that could be duplicated easily in-country that would make farming chores less labor-intensive. They even helped local manufacturers produce some of these farm machineries and implements. They provided prototypes of simple machines used in private sector feed grain projects. As a result, we started to see the in-country manufacture and commercial sale of grain threshers, dryers, grinders, and irrigation pumps.
But thankfully, these large cash outlay acquisitions were covered by government-backed low-interest funding through its agricultural development and rural banking system. For qualified big farms’ co-ops and farmers’ unions, commercial funding was also available. I noticed also that quite a few enterprising individuals with financial means like former landlords did buy, on their own initiative with their compensation money, large or medium farm tractors or wet field tillers to prepare the soil for farmers, harvesters or mobile threshers, transportable dryers or portable millers to process paddy during harvest time at mutually agreed fees. They made a brisk and lucrative business during certain stages of the crop season.
However most of these essential activities were performed for farmers by their co-ops and unions or the farmers themselves once they made enough money to buy their own farm equipments, which more and more of them did. The case in point, most farmers ended up buying a Honda motorcycle for transportation in rural areas with the proceeds from planting Miracle Rice. That’s why they called high-yield Miracle Rice “Honda Rice”.
Our Directorate of Farm Co-operatives and Farmers’ Unions was quite busy organizing farmers into self-governing co-ops and unions to pool their limited resources together so that they could get loans for production agri-inputs at more affordable costs thanks to the economy of scale, be it fertilizer, insecticides, herbicides, or farm equipment, without going through any middlemen. Farmers’ co-ops and unions also strengthen their bargaining power during the marketing phase of the products of their labor. We were able to organize 30,000 farmers and fishermen into farmers’ co-operatives in 1972.
8. Market: (Bát Thị)
Several researchers are of the opinion that government rice trade policy is the number one deciding factor whether commercial rice farming is successful or not. Farmers invariably choose to revert to subsistence farming if there is artificial or arbitrary price control of rice that makes rice growing a non-profitable enterprise. The communists learned this lesson the hard way after their victory: ideology could not trump the law of economics and the proletariat could not dictate to the farmers to make them productive.
It turned out that for many years marketing was the weakest link of the AMRPP because the rice trade was tightly controlled by our government for obvious reason at that time because of the need to deny food to our sworn enemy. This tended to impede free movement of the rice trade and to discourage farmers’ production at commercial level as there was no incentive for them to do so. Not to mention the fact every time you put bureaucrats in the tight control of economic activities you create a fertile ground for graft and corruption. That is why one can see the same situation prevailing even to this day in the Philippines where high-yield rice varieties originated. There the government has to import every year about a million metric tons of rice to feed a hundred million people because the politicians want to control rice price to appease their urban constituents for votes. Other countries which control rice prices like Myanmar and Sri Lanka for political expediency are all rice importers.
It’s worth mentioning the case of Viet Nam, the only communist country that exports a lot of rice. Contrary to the dictum “Show me a communist country and I can tell you that it’s a country that could not feed its people”, Viet Nam is a communist country but not only it could feed its 93,000,000 people, but manages to be the number 1 export of rice in the world displacing Thailand from this top spot that it had been holding for a long time. So how this could happen?
Right after North Viet Nam took over South Viet Nam, it tried in earnest to collectivize the farmers. This rude and crude attempt to impose tight organization and control on farmers had been working in North Viet Nam because farmers there did not know any better, going as they had from being slaves of landlords to slaves of the state. But, in South Viet Nam, after the Land To The Tiller Program tore the yoke of land tenancy from their neck, the farmers enjoyed a few years of freedom and tasted free private enterprise blessings. They really liked what they experienced even though it was short-lived. And so when they were forced to give back their land titles and to be herded into more than 1,500 communes or co-ops and 9,350 Production Teams (Tap Doan San Xuat) in order to produce for the state at fixed price along the famous communist line of “From each according to his ability and to each according to his need”, things did not work out well. Even ignorant farmers saw through all these faked utopian promises.
So South Viet Nam was on the verge of starvation for more than a decade. My parents told me that people were forced to eat rice mixed with corn, yam, taro root, sorghum, and raw banana all these miserable years. Inflation shot up through the roof. When asked to produce according to their ability, all of a sudden farmers’ ability diminished to subsistence level production. They gradually killed their fruit trees and consumed their breeding stocks to avoid unreasonable taxation and arbitrary confiscation. Then when the people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe wised up and freed themselves, the Viet Namese Communist Party saw the writing on the wall and especially when they realized how well Teng Hsiao Ping’s market economy was doing in China. They followed suite with their 1988 Market Economy with its Socialistic Directive reform to free up the South Viet Namese farmers’ entrepreneurial spirit. Something they dubbed Doi Moi (New Change) and put an end to their “bao cap” (government subsidy and ration) regimen.
South Viet Nam re-exported almost a million tons of rice the following year and continued to do so to this day. This was not because of anything the communists were doing in developing agriculture, but because the free Second Republic of Viet Nam had accomplished that task more than a decade earlier. Through the relentless efforts of some 70,000 hard-working people toiling for the Ministry of Land Reform and Agriculture Development under the most trying conditions, the RVN had laid down the rock-solid foundation for agricultural development in the Mekong Delta in particular and for agriculture-based economic development of the nation in general. In doing so we whetted the farmers’ appetite for the blessings of a free private enterprise system of an ownership society that President Nguyen Van Thieu created through his rural social revolution. In every sense, this was a true REVOLUTION that changed completely a society much like the well-known American Revolution or the French Revolution -- even though it was a bloodless one.
These efforts left such an indelible mark in the farmers’ consciousness, belief, thinking, attitude, and behavior that not even the brutal, coercive, highhanded, and dictatorial communist doctrine could erase it. To paraphrase Churchill, they just simply hated the equal sharing of miseries after having tasted the unequal sharing of blessings under the Second Republic of Viet Nam. I like to say that this state of mind transcends the ideological boundaries and I am glad that our Ministry of Land Reform and Agriculture Development played a pivotal role in President Thieu’s social revolution that started it all.
I am not going to elaborate on how the Politburo and the Central Committee through a slew of decrees and edits finally gave the farmers back practically all the rights they enjoyed during the Second Republic of Viet Nam. Farmers again were allowed private ownership of means of production and given the rights to enjoy the fruits of their labor. They could not own their lands, but they had the rights to use the lands for twenty years if they grew annual crops and fifty years if they planted orchard trees, but they could turn it over to their descendants or exchange or lease it to someone else or mortgage their land-use rights during that time frame. The following year production increased by a million metric tons of rice and rice import ended. Chad Raymond, an assistant professor of political science at Elon Univeristy, North Carolina wrote an excellent paper about his field research in Viet Nam on the utter failure of NVN collectivization scheme entitled, “No Responsibility and No Rice: The Rise and Fall of Agricultural Collectivization in Viet Nam” published by the The Agricultural History Society. This peaceful resistance of the Southern rice farmers also led to the rapid dismantling and utter destruction of the 20-year old collectivization of land use in the north, thus unleashing the boundless productive energy and freeing up the entrepreneurial spirit of the Vietnamese farmers.
This story serves to stress the paramount importance of government policy in rice production. But, let me continue to elaborate on our own work on laying the rock-solid foundation for Miracle Rice production in the early seventies. At that time South Viet Nam was plagued with constant problems of rice supply to rice-deficient areas, with corruption by unscrupulous officials in charge of the control of the movement of rice, and with speculation, hoarding, and black market by profiteering rice merchants. This is inherent with any kind of control of trade reminiscent of the control of alcohol and tobacco in this country years ago.
This sad state of affair wrought havoc in urban life and on the fixed income segment of our society like soldiers and civil servants, causing undue problems and serious distraction to our central government. The daily difficulty they experienced brought about mounting disaffection among the urban population, the foundation of our regime.
This was why there were concerted efforts by the MTI in 1973 on order from the highest level of our government to implement a new rice marketing policy based on free trade and private sector involvement in all aspects of the business and to get the government’s tight control and stiff regulation out of this vitally important sector of our economy. This is another story that I will relate in the Rice Marketing Program launched by the MTI that I was personally in charge of in the last part of this narrative.
THE ACCELERATED MIRACLE RICE PRODUCTION PROGRAM (Part IV)
Difficulties
As with any massive undertaking, we encountered all kinds of difficulties, but somehow we managed to overcome most of them thanks to the resourcefulness and the hard work of the South Vietnamese people as well as the determination and dedication of its leaders at every level of government.
This is not to say that we undervalued the beneficial assistance of our allies, mostly our American friends in any way. They played an important role in the success of our program implementation as did our other allies. Let me cite a few examples:
President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines overrode his own country’s law to allow South Viet Nam to have the first six tons of IR-8 high-yield rice from IRRI to jumpstart our Green Revolution. I heard that it took President Johnson’s direct intervention to get President Marcos’ favorable response to our request. The IRRI rice experts and other Filipino agriculturists helped us carry out our rice research and new rice varieties adaptation since they knew a lot more about them than our experts.
The Nationalist Chinese Aid Mission helped us with post-rice-harvest horticulture to supplement farmers’ income and to fully utilize land resources. They introduced a lot of new high-yield fast-growing strains of vegetables and taught us modern horticultural practices. Farmers got extra monetary benefits from this secondary crops farming. The Taiwanese helped start our local commercial vegetable seeds production. This was also very beneficial from the standpoint of consumers’ health.
They were also good at fresh water fish farming, which was a big commercial enterprise for people living along the many tributaries of the Mekong River system. Fish, both fresh water and marine types, were the main source of protein for the South Vietnamese people. So, fish raising and fish catching programs both inland and off shore fishing were greatly emphasized and promoted.
I was once the guide to Chiang Ching Kuo, the son of President Chiang Kai Shek of Taiwan and later himself President of his country, to inspect the vegetable demonstration sites set up by the Taiwan Aid Mission horticulturists in Bien Hoa Province. He told me to put out more efforts into the development of that branch of agriculture because they bring more money to the rice farmers on a smaller land surface and would prevent famine when bad weather wrought havoc in our rice growing. He said that farmers could have things to eat and to sell in these hard times just after a few weeks of growing on a year round basis on small plots of land rather than three to six months of growing rice that must be done at the right season. He was right about this because during the decade when the communists fouled up agricultural production due to their forced collectivization of farming operations that led to the South Vietnamese farmers going back to subsistence farming, it was the vegetables that alleviated the detrimental impact of the rice shortfall. My parents told me that, as everybody else, they turned their lawn into vegetable garden for year round production of stuff to fill their stomachs and to barter for other items of subsistence when the communists stripped them of all their wealth, assets, properties, and means of production in their anti-capitalist drive.
Since agricultural programs were carried out in the countryside sometimes far away from cities and towns, security was always of paramount concern. It was not easy to do any worthwhile work when someone was trying to shoot or kidnap you at every turn. But thanks to the government pacification program that brought about decent security to eighty or ninety per cent of our hamlets and villages, a lot of work could still be done in the day time.
Even though I cultivated fruitful working relationships with the great majority of my American counterparts and advisers in different discipline working at the central level, every so often we had problems with American experts in the field. One story always came to my mind, which involved some intransigent American pest control expert working in the Mekong Delta. He was adamant about killing rice-field rats. His thinking was that rats destroyed an enormous amount of rice paddy every year, rice that could be put to good use feeding people in the cities. He supported his contention with all kinds of studies. And we could not convince him that Vietnamese farmers did trap and catch these well-fed plump big rice-field rats to eat and to sell to city folks on the market just like the Americans hunting rabbits and squirrels for meat. Rats are ugly to look at but are a rich and good source of protein and are extraordinarily tasty. And they constitute an easy source of cash for our rice farmers.
My field people were caught between the unwilling farmers and a well-meaning willing American friend. Because I always told my field people to do their best not to alienate the Americans or else I had to find people who could work with them, they did not know what to do. So, I stepped in. I told my guys to do everything the American taught them to do to train farmers in pest control, but when he was gone, to take the bait home and use it in offices and homes to kill sewage city rats and mice instead. And that’s what they did.
Meanwhile I had to convince the American pest control expert my way. So, I invited him and the American entomologist and our field people to a scrumptious five-course baby rabbit dinner complete with good farmers’ sorghum wine that my Lower House Agriculture Committee Chairman uncle provided for the occasion. We had grilled, stewed, braised, stir-fried, and broiled baby rabbit dishes. I told the cook to be sure to cut up the meat in small pieces before serving. Everybody was ranting and raving about how delicious, succulent, tender, and tasty the dishes were. And trust me they were! When the pest control expert voiced his appreciation that this was the best meal of baby rabbit he had ever eaten in his entire life, I said, “I think so too and I am sure that our farmers would second our opinion. So, do you know why they resisted so vehemently to your attempts to exterminate their baby rabbits?” The entomologist chimed in, “I knew that the bones are too small and too soft for rabbit. I worked in the Philippines for many years and found that their so-called baby rabbits were also very good to eat but not as elaborately cooked as these. And you could not tell farmers over there to get rid of them either. Come to think about it, you turn cheap rice carbohydrate into good source of protein costing two to three times higher on weight by weight basis. You don’t have to do a doggone thing to raise them either. Just trap them at night. You cannot beat that.” The pest control expert managed to emit a soft, “I’ll be d--n!” I had my last words, “If you could get more of these excellent American wire traps that you use to catch rodents for study so effectively and give to farmers to improve their catches you would become so popular that I bet you could run for our General Assembly and get elected hands down!”
Later on, I learned from Mr. Nha that even President Thieu consumed the succulent rice field rat meat and so did everybody who lives and works in the rice fields. It was also my favorite meat. That’s why every time I went to Can Tho my people invariably got me a bag of rat meat to take home just as they did with sand dune iguana meat when I went to Nha Trang. There is not any kind of meat that is as tender, tasty, and flavorful as rice-fed field rat succulent meat.
However, most of my problems in implementing our MLRAD programs did not come from the Americans but from our implacable enemy. They invariably tried their utmost best to derail and defeat our plans. And they usually came up with very clever ways to do that. Here is one good example.
When we were implementing the Miracle Rice Production Program, some American fisheries expert got us a wonderful fish species from the Philippines called the Tilapia fish. They reproduced extremely fast. In fact, they produced so fast that there was not enough food to feed them and so they could not grow big. But that was no obstacles because our farmers can eat them small in many ways: deep-fried, salt-pickled, salt-dried, boiled. All the farmers had to do was to release a few baby fish in the flooded rice-fields in the beginning of the growing season when the field was flooded and by the end of the wet season, they could harvest thousands of them without having to do anything. They just scavenged around in the flooded rice-fields for food themselves: algae, snails, larvae, small fries, insects… Great source of easy, good, and cheap protein, these Tilapia!
So, at night the VC’s would parade an advanced case of leprosy in the villages and have him or her say that the affliction was caused by their eating Tilapia fish. This would stop ignorant and credulous farmers from raising and eating that fish. Words spread like fire throughout the Mekong Delta. Therefore, to counteract this scheme I and a lot of our local officials had to visit villages throughout the Delta and had lunch of fried Tilapia fish with village officials and invited skeptical farmers to join in. I also ordered all our Provincial Services in problem provinces to do likewise. Meanwhile I requested that all lepers be rounded up by local authority and sent to the Bao Loc Leprosy Colony in the highlands for treatment by the catholic nuns there. Wherever I went I hauled with me soybean oil for deep-frying small Tilapia fish. My favorite way to eat Tilapia was to get the oil boiling hot and then drop a bucket of them without time-consuming scaling or cleaning. The 400-degree boiling oil got the fish scales all fluffed up and made the whole small fish crispy like potato chip so you can eat the whole fish, scales, head, bones, guts, and all. After awhile this scare tactic was neutralized. To this day Tilapia fish is still popular in the Delta. To get bigger fish farmers have to raise them in pond or cage and feed them with commercial feeds instead of raise them as scavengers in flooded ricefields.
The above-example showed that to work with skeptical, conservative, and even cynical farmers we had to come up some clever way to convince them. When we wanted to propagate Miracle Rice, the farmers would not believe that this high yield rice could produce two to three times the native varieties of rice or that they could grow to three or sometimes even four crops a year with the short-maturing (ninety days) strains. So we had to get USAID to help us with funding to set up thousands of demonstration plots all over the country especially in the Mekong Delta. We used government experiment stations lands, communal lands, and contractual progressive farmers’ lands (the best). We enlisted the help of religious and local political leaders, and farmers’ organizations to jump on the bandwagon to convince farmers. We made sure to use optimal growing techniques to get the highest yield possible by assigning the young agronomy graduates armed with adequate agri-inputs to monitor closely these demo sites for signs of trouble and for timely intervention to snip problems in the bud. We chose the locations that were the most exposed to passers-by for obvious reason. When the harvest time was close we trucked farmers from afar to see the results for themselves. We had our extension on hands to teach farmers right on the spot. We posted armed village security cadres to guard day and night these plots but we specifically told the guards to get drunk -- which was very easy to do -- and pass out and sleep most of time to let whoever wanted to steal the seeds to do so at will and with impunity, which they always did.
When harvest time came we made it a big fanfare well announced in advance and well publicized in the community. And if the seeds were grown on farmers’ lands we paid with cash at rice seed price and not rice paddy price, which was twice higher than what the farmers could get from selling their paddy to rice traders, for use more in future demonstration plots or for farmers to use as their starting stock for the coming harvest season. The news spread like wildfire and we had no problem getting more participants in our program. Even North Viet Namese farmers used Miracle Rice strains up there -- just one year behind us thanks to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
All this grassroots work required a lot of agricultural technocrats of all levels from engineers to technicians and down to cadres who would work with farmers in the countryside. The intensive training of these technocrats to make them well-versed in the latest riziculture technology was extremely important. SVN at that time had a huge world-class Rice Research and Training Station in the Delta set up for us by the French, then the Americans with the help of IRRI rice scientists and staffed by our best foreign-trained scientists and trainers. We trained our trainers by the thousands there every month who would go back to their provinces and villages to train other people and the farmers at their localities. Being myself an educator, I firmly believe in training our technocrats and cadres in all aspects of agricultural development. To this day, I still think that these training efforts were the main reason of all our spectacular successes of our program’s implementation and their lasting legacy. I have to admit that Vietnamese farmers are very progressive and receptive on matter of modern agricultural technologies.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention the paramount role of the Province Chief or District Chief in the successful implementation of any government program. Of all the Province Chiefs, I had the greatest cooperation with Col Nguyen Van Man, Province Chief of the important An Giang Province over the years ever since I was Director of Cabinet and later Director General of Agriculture of the MLRAD and Administrator General of the National Food Administration (NFA) under the MTI. He happened to have a Hoa Hao background like me and a good friend of my uncle Huynh Van Lau, the Lower House Agriculture Committee Chairman. We were so close that in the US Embassy background report about me just declassified, it was mentioned that he was my uncle. He was not. You just could not achieve much without the strong support and close cooperation of regional, provincial, and local authorities during these chaotic war years. And I was pretty good at cultivating that kind of good working relationship. That’s because I don’t know how many times I read Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends and Influence People.”
I spent most of my time in the predominantly Hoa Hao and catholic provinces for three reasons:
1) These people were strongly anti-communist and, thus, these areas were very safe day and night to work in;
2) I could easily influence these farmers just by working with their religious or political leaders, therefore, it was a great time-saver and a strong effort-multiplier because farmers did listen to their religious leaders;
3) I’d like to build my political base just in case someone else became President of South Viet Nam and I lost my government job, thus I could go back home and run for our General Assembly as deputy or senator. As a result, the top two rice producers of all time in all Viet Nam to this day are still An-Giang (which is main Hoa-Hao country) with 3.5 million metric tons and Kien-Giang (where President Ngo Dinh Diem settled most of the Northen Vietnamese Roman catholic farmers) with 3.4 million metric tons according to 2008 statistics.
Results
So, did all these efforts pay off? I would have to say that the results were spectacular even though I am a modest and simple man with simple taste who enjoyed rat and iguana meat. Let’s look at some figures to find the answer to this question in concrete terms. Statistics of Miracle Rice planting acreage, total rice planting acreage, total rice paddy production showed remarkable achievements in the following chart:
CHART SHOWING ACREAGE OF MIRACLE RICE, ACREAGE OF TOTAL RICE, AND TOTAL PADDY PRODUCTION:
These figures showed clearly that South Viet Nam was theoretically self-sufficient in rice by the 1971-1972 harvest season when 1,700,000 acres (not counting farmers who planted Miracle Rice on their own outside the government-sponsored program) of high-yield rice varieties were planted out of 6,250,000 acres of total rice lands, producing a projected total 6,324,000 metric tons of rice paddy well over the estimated 6,100,000 metric tons required to feed the entire population at the time.
Proofs of Rice Self-Sufficiency
As far as our government was concerned, South Viet Nam had achieved self-sufficiency in rice in 1975 for sure when 7,150,000 metric tons of paddy was produced in the 1974-1975 harvest, excluding the high-yield rice produced outside the DGA-sponsored program, which was substantial. If a small amount of American rice was still imported in 1973, it was just a quick-fix attempt to quell the chaotic situation in the rice market and the ensuing panic among the urban population. It was also a ploy by our government to secure American aid waiting for the result of the real fix of the situation – the promulgation of the new Rice Trade Policy of the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) in 1974 under the leadership of the new Minister Nguyen Duc Cuong. American officials and politicians as always were very empathetic with people on the verge of starvation due to their compassionate nature. So, our government (MTI) was prone to take advantage of that largesse for our quick fix of food supply problems real or perceived in those difficult days.
By late 1974, the National Food Administration, an autonomous agency under the MTI that I headed since late 1973, had a strategic stockpile of some 300,000 metric tons in MR I, MR II, and MR III by early 1974 with more coming in the pipeline on a daily basis from the Mekong Delta despite heavy fighting and emergency shipments for refugees. The numbers said it all: in 1974 the NFA shipped only 2,000 metric tons to perennially-rice-deficient Central Viet Nam as compared to 40,000 metric tons in 1973, showing that even the chronically rice-deficient Central area was practically rice-sufficient by 1974.
Another proof that rice was not in short supply was that some provinces in traditionally rice-deficient Central South Viet Nam like Ninh Thuan and Phu Yen did not need Southern rice for the first time in a decade. It was only in MR I provinces where a lot of heavy fighting was going on constantly, resulting in abandonment of rice growing and a sharp increase of refugees, that some government’s stockpiled rice in Da Nang government warehouses was needed on a regular basis to satisfy the need of the urban population.
One more significant proof that attested to the fact that the rice situation was not critical was that no future provision of rice import was contemplated. In other words, 1973 marked the last time that we imported rice from the USA. In fact, the emergency shipment of 30,000 MT of American rice diverted to South Viet Nam from other South East Asian countries in early 1974 to stabilize the rice market was hardly used and ended up being stockpiled for strategic reserve. Only native rice was used because imported rice lost its appeal due to the new non-subsidized price set at world price under Minister Nguyen Duc Cuong’s new Rice Trade Policy, put in effect during the first days of 1974.
But the most solid proof would be the fact that the rice market was stabilized for the first time in a decade. No one was talking in the General Assembly, writing in the local newspapers, complaining in the street, worrying at homes, arguing in the countryside, discussing in the government circle about rice price or rice availability anymore. The war was raging in 1975, but there was no food crisis. In fact, our government rice stockpile was more than adequate, since it ended feeding the whole hungry invading army and the multitude of undernourished carpet baggers from the North for a whole year after they took over the South. My former employees at NFA told me that they even hauled some of that rice up North to feed the chronically underfed leaders of the proletariat. This wonderful situation lasted about a year or so until the communist regime mucked it up with their rude and crude collectivization scheme of rice farming in the Delta that led to the farmers going back predictably to subsistence farming and the decade-long near starvation in the towns and cities of the South.
Conclusion
As you can see, just like the Directorate General of Land Affairs with the Land To The Tiller Program implementation before, the Directorate General of Agriculture performed a superb job in the Accelerated Miracle Rice Production Program and other programs of lesser scale. I put in place a well-oiled and efficient machine that could take any program of any magnitude and bring it to completion provided that adequate supervision and inspection were provided. And I am talking about just one of two dozen or so programs that the DGA implemented at that time in all the sectors of our agriculture.
The rural social revolution that President Nguyen Van Thieu visualized began to take roots in a big positive way. His agriculture-based economic development of his nation that he ordered was on an overdrive trajectory with great promise for the future as judging from the success of the most important program of that plan—the Accelerated Miracle Rice Production Program. His vision of a predominantly rural middle class for South Viet Nam began to materialize at a rapid rate. The main players that he entrusted with the execution of his hopes and dreams for his people seemed to have a firm grip on the plan of action to carry them out to a successful conclusion.
Epilogue
After a couple of years I knew exactly what, when, where, how, and why to do this kind of work. I felt as snug as a bug in the rug as the DGA Chief. I was happy in my elements. I led by examples from the front quite successfully. My people worked hard because they admired me and not because they feared me. I never asked them to do anything that I could not do it myself. For example, when the government armed civil servants to protect their facilities round the clock after the communist failed Tet Mau Than Offensive, I pulled the same armed guard duty at night as any peons in my organization when it was my turn. No other high level officials in our government of my status did that. Bureaucrats at that time were not paid enough to be led by orders. They put forth a great effort only if they admired their leadership or if they really wanted to contribute their fair share to our overall struggle against an implacable enemy or if they truly believed in the righteousness of our common cause. I was pretty good at making people who served under me feel like that because the Vietnamese people are deep down a very patriotic people and the nationalist cadres were basically a devoted bunch.
I began to work on exciting spin-off programs when President Thieu put a screeching halt to that by unexpectedly appointing me, in yet another reshuffle of his administration, Vice-Minister of Agriculture, which was a cabinet rank. This was just a prelude to something else even more important that I was called upon to carry out. You can say that it was the culmination of an interesting and successful career in public service in a nation ravaged by an endless and implacable war of aggression. The fact that we achieved the successes we did spoke volume of the resiliency, the resourcefulness, the determination, and the dedication of the South Vietnamese agricultural cadres and officials. I was so proud and so grateful to have the opportunity of a lifetime to lead these people in that important task for a good part of my productive life.
It was my curious fate that every time I was unexpectedly handed a new job to carry out, the degree of difficulty seemed to increase exponentially because the work to be done was farther and farther out of my area of specialty and comfort zone and the problem was more and more urgent and challenging. This coming job was the third of such time.
(Zorro gửi tặng. ttngbt cảm ơn vì đã được phép đăng loạt bài giá trị này)
Dr Trần Quang Minh
Chữ viết tắt:
RVN : Republic of VietNam (Viet Nam Cong Hoa)
MoD: Ministry of Defense (BỘ Quốc Phòng)
MoEd: Ministry of Education: Bộ Quốc Gia Giáo Dục
NAI: National Agriculture Institute: Trung Tâm Quốc Gia Nông Nghiệp (tức turong2 Cao Đẳng (hoạc ĐH) Nông Nghiệp SG, đường CƯờng Để)
Director of Cabinet: Đổng lý văn phòng Bộ
MR: Military Region (Quân Đoàn/Quân Khu/Vùng chiến thuật) chẳng hạn MR IV : Quân Đoàn 4
SSAFAS: Superior School of Agronomy Forestry and Animal Science , same as NAI, tức trường Đại Học Nông Nghiệp trước khi đổi tên thành NAI
VLDC: Village Land Distribution Committee Hội đồng duyệt xét cấp đất ở địa phương
VAC: local Village Administrative Committee Hội Đồng Xã
MoEd: Ministry of Education: Bộ Quốc Gia Giáo Dục
NAI: National Agriculture Institute: Trung Tâm Quốc Gia Nông Nghiệp (tức turong2 Cao Đẳng (hoạc ĐH) Nông Nghiệp SG, đường CƯờng Để)
Director of Cabinet: Đổng lý văn phòng Bộ
MR: Military Region (Quân Đoàn/Quân Khu/Vùng chiến thuật) chẳng hạn MR IV : Quân Đoàn 4
SSAFAS: Superior School of Agronomy Forestry and Animal Science , same as NAI, tức trường Đại Học Nông Nghiệp trước khi đổi tên thành NAI
VLDC: Village Land Distribution Committee Hội đồng duyệt xét cấp đất ở địa phương
VAC: local Village Administrative Committee Hội Đồng Xã
PLAS: Provincial Land Affair Service: Ty Điền Địa (Tỉnh)
DGLA: Directorate General of Land Affairs : Tổng Nha Cải Cách Diền Địa (trục thuộc Bộ Nông Nghiệp)
CLRC: Central Land Reform Council Hội đồng cố vấn Cải Cách Điền Địa
DGA: Directorate General of Agriculture Tổng Nha Nông Nghiệp (trực thuộc Bộ Nông Nghiệp)
MTI: Ministry of Trade and Industry Bộ Phát triển Thương mại và công kỹ Nghệ (tức là Bộ Kinh Tế)
MLRAD: Ministry of Land Reform ans Agriculture Development: Bo Cai Cach Dien Dia va Phat Trien Nong Nghiep - goi tat la Bo Nong Nghiep
NFA: National Food Administration: Tổng Cuộc Thực Phẩm Quốc Gia, co quan tự trị (giống như Ngân Hàng VIệt Nam Thương Tín) có CHủ Tịch Hội Đồng Quản Trị (Chair of board of director) là TỔng Trưởng Kinh Tế (lúc đó là TT Nguyễn Đúc Cường, 35 hay 36 tuổi) và điều hảnh bởi 1 Tổng Cuộc Trưởng, chúc vụ này ngang hàng với Thứ Trưởng Bộ Kinh Tế (lúc đó là TỔng Minh, nhận chúc vị sau khi rời chúc vụ Tổng GD NN và làm Thứ Truong Bộ NN)
DGLA: Directorate General of Land Affairs : Tổng Nha Cải Cách Diền Địa (trục thuộc Bộ Nông Nghiệp)
CLRC: Central Land Reform Council Hội đồng cố vấn Cải Cách Điền Địa
DGA: Directorate General of Agriculture Tổng Nha Nông Nghiệp (trực thuộc Bộ Nông Nghiệp)
MTI: Ministry of Trade and Industry Bộ Phát triển Thương mại và công kỹ Nghệ (tức là Bộ Kinh Tế)
MLRAD: Ministry of Land Reform ans Agriculture Development: Bo Cai Cach Dien Dia va Phat Trien Nong Nghiep - goi tat la Bo Nong Nghiep
NFA: National Food Administration: Tổng Cuộc Thực Phẩm Quốc Gia, co quan tự trị (giống như Ngân Hàng VIệt Nam Thương Tín) có CHủ Tịch Hội Đồng Quản Trị (Chair of board of director) là TỔng Trưởng Kinh Tế (lúc đó là TT Nguyễn Đúc Cường, 35 hay 36 tuổi) và điều hảnh bởi 1 Tổng Cuộc Trưởng, chúc vụ này ngang hàng với Thứ Trưởng Bộ Kinh Tế (lúc đó là TỔng Minh, nhận chúc vị sau khi rời chúc vụ Tổng GD NN và làm Thứ Truong Bộ NN)
IRRI: International Reseach of Rice Institute, cha đẻ các giống lúa thần Nông than ngắn, lá thẳng mà bắt đấu là IR8
THE ACCELERATED MIRACLE RICE PRODUCTION PROGRAM (AMRPP)
“The Accelerated Miracle Rice Production Program” (AMRPP) was the third major MLRAD program that I was directly involved in. Even though the MLRAD had been implementing at least two dozens agricultural development programs in the nine agricultural sectors that it managed, this program was by far the most important agricultural development program of the Second Republic of Viet Nam because of its magnitude in term of men, money, and materials devoted to its implementation as well as its extension in every corner of the country.
As anyone who lives in Viet Nam would attest, rice is the most important component of the South Vietnamese economy as, for that matter, the economy of most other developing Asian countries. Rice is also the most vital element of the VietNamese livelihood and an enduring feature of the Vietnamese culture as one would encounter its manifestation in our literature, art, folklore, festivities, and daily activities since time immemorial. In other words, no one could deny the key role that rice plays in the whole SVN economy.
Of course, after the spectacularly swift completion of the massive Land-To-The-Tiller land reform program, it would not be hard to think that the next logical step in President Thieu’s rural social revolution would be the various agricultural production programs to improve the farmers’ livelihood. And it was understandable that the government realized also at a time of diminished foreign assistance that a major endeavor towards food self-sufficiency was mandatory. If rice export, discontinued since 1964 because of the disruption by an escalating war, resumed in earnest then it would be most beneficial for the nation building. There was no way that South Viet Nam could afford to import an average of 435,000 metric tons of rice (equivalent of 900,000 MT of paddy) for its yearly consumption as during the height of the American involvement in the Viet Nam War. During the period from 1966 to 1972, SVN had to import 2,600,000 metric tons of rice to satisfy its population’s need, mostly from the USA. So, President Thieu considered that it was a matter of foremost and great urgency for our country to achieve rice self-sufficiency. He stressed this policy in all his major pronouncements.
Background
In 1972, the MLRAD was tasked with drafting a Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan for President Thieu to take it along when he would meet with President Nixon at their Summit Meeting early the following year in San Clemente at the Western White House on March, 1973. President Thieu was seeking President Nixon’s assistance in launching his country’s agriculture-based economic development after the monumental success of his signature land reform rural social revolution that practically won the insurgency war for our side. It was no surprise to anyone in the country that President Thieu shifted his focus now to agricultural development to rebuild his country’s agrarian society since it had been devastated by a protracted and vicious war of aggression by North Viet Nam. Remember that at the time roughly 65 % of the South Vietnamese or 11,000,000 people still lived on agriculture.
President Thieu, at the first anniversary of the LTTTP in Long Xuyen in 1971, proclaimed that his Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan centered on the following three urgent objectives:
1.To satisfy national consumption demands of essential commodities,
2.To increase the living standard of rural people,
3.To decrease imports and increase exports.
In his speech in front of 5000 local farmers who received land ownership titles, he announced the following three main points of his administration economic policy:
1.Economic development must be carried out in parallel with the realization of social justice.
2.Together with the social justice and progress, economic development must create a new society in which every citizen becomes well-to-do and the middle class makes up the majority of the people.
3.Once all the citizens are well provided for and properly fed, the effort to make the nation self-sufficient, especially in foodstuffs would be achieved. From there, the agricultural sector, which forms the basis of the economy, should be able to provide amply all the raw materials needed for the development of light industries that will jump start the industrialization and modernization process of the whole country.
As I remember, even though the drafting of the plan was ordered by Minister Cao Van Than, his current Director General of Agriculture Pham Huy Lan allowed the work to languish at the nine different Directorates. Even though Minister Than brought in one of his fellow University of Pittsburgh economics classmates as Assistant Minister to help direct the effort for a while, it was still slow going and very inadequate. It was understandable since this was the first time something of this magnitude had been tackled at the MLRAD.
I think the problem was mainly lack of cooperation and resentment of the MLRAD entrenched bureaucracy. The former Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) was one of the oldest portfolio of our government and it had been always run by the old French-trained and Vietnamese-trained agricultural technocrats clique. Minister Than was the first American-trained economist and lawyer, and thus non-agriculturist, who was put in charge of the portfolio to carry out President Thieu’s landmark Land To The Tiller land reform program. Minister Than was one of the President’s best and brightest individuals of the Specialists Group working in his inner circle at the Palace. I was also a young American-trained veterinarian, brought in to the third-highest position as Director of Cabinet bypassing quite a few people with seniority. As a result, a lot of leading rank and file officials in the Ministry showed a palpable resentment, reticence, lack of cooperation, discontent, and disinterest. So the massive plan formulation was performed perfunctorily and with constant delays not to mention with dubious quality.
In South Viet Nam, if people chose to do the minimum, not much was accomplished or if it was completed the quality of the work proved so poor that it was worthless. On top of that, a coordinated, cohesive, coherent, workable, and detailed implementation plan encompassing all nine agricultural sectors had never been done before by our ministry to acceptable international standard to secure foreign aid. So nobody knew exactly how to craft such a plan.
That was when I came in the picture. In mid 1972, MLRAD Minister Cao Van Than appointed me Director General of Agriculture (DGA) with two important and urgent tasks: 1) Finalize the drafting of the Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan; 2) Speed up the implementation of the nascent Miracle Rice Production Program to achieve food self-sufficiency at the earliest time possible as ordered by the President.
It’s worth mentioning that I was shifted from a staff function of Chief Staff (Director of Cabinet), a third-highest-ranking official in the Ministry to a line function of Director General of Agriculture, a sixth-highest-ranking official. But this organization was the biggest entity in our entire government with its nine directorates in Saigon and local offices in four Military Regions, and forty four provinces up and down the whole country, employing some 20,000 full-time people with variable numbers of temporary employees recruited for different programs:
1) Directorate of Crops Production and Protection;
2) Directorate of Livestock Production and Protection;
3) Directorate of Fisheries,
4) Directorate of Forestry;
5) Directorate of Farm Mechanization;
6) Directorate of Irrigation;
7) Directorate of Farm Cooperatives and Farmers’ Union;
8) Directorate Agricultural Extension;
9) Directorate of Agricultural Research.
My first focus was to complete the drafting of a good workable Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan in time for the President to take with him along with other plans of his administration to the Summit Meeting with President Nixon. It turned out to be a monumental task for me because after reading the disparate drafts that the nine Directorates submitted to the Directorate General of Agriculture for consideration, I found out that the various plans were not done with the same format, with any consistency and cohesiveness. They were disparate plans written with different language styles by different people, with different degrees of readiness and levels of quality, without plans of implementation and without many local or regional references. So, I made the important decision to do this work myself with a central team of planners at the DGA with inputs gathered from the nine directorates and in the fields in the same format. The big problem was that there was no such team in existence and I had no experience in this endeavor.
In the old days, whenever I wanted to learn something fast I always turned to my American advisers to pick their brains. And in those days, South Viet Nam was blessed with the biggest USAID set up overseas. There were hundreds of experts in all fields of human endeavor with their vast experience, having worked all over the developing world for decades. The best and the brightest development officials gathered in Saigon to assist us. And all we had to do was to call them and ask for whatever experts we wanted to advise us or our people.
Sometimes they went out of their way to help us. I remember on one occasion when I was Director of Cabinet, my Minister sent me to a week-long Regional FAO Meeting in Canberra, Australia, the USAID/Saigon sent Mr. Gleason who used to be an Associate (or Assistant) Director of Agriculture to accompany me there. We even roomed close together at the hotel. He spent a whole week of free time throughout the day and even late into the night to discuss with me about agriculture development: the what, the where, the how, the when, and why of this vital undertaking. I was trained in animal husbandry and veterinary medicine and knew very little about modern agricultural development in the developing world. Mr. Gleason had vast experience in this field having worked for decades all over the developing world. He was very patient in relating his valuable experience to me and in answering my probing questions as though he was anticipating my career rise and tried to groom me for important agricultural development work ahead in the service of my country and my people. As a result I was a very knowledgeable executive on agricultural development issues at whatever high level position I held in government. I had nothing but great association, pleasant working relation, and fruitful cooperation with all my American counterparts and advisers. And over the years, I had a great number of them working with me at all levels.
The case in point, when I was sent down to take over the leadership of the Directorate General of Agriculture to craft the Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan, I needed a score of graduates of different fields of agriculture to help gather data from various executives at all levels of the nine different agricultural sectors and forty four provinces on a crash basis. USAID provided me not only with the necessary fund for staffing —including loaning us secretarial staff from USAID -- for such undertaking, but also an expert on agricultural development planning, an old economic professor from Louisiana to give our team a crash course on agricultural development planning. When I met with him, he said right off the cuff, “Dr. Minh, only communist countries have five-year development plans. And have you ever heard of any of their plans worth a d--n? You are lucky if you can just plan one year ahead.” So I said, “Look, Dr. Bolton, you have to take this up with President Thieu or have your Ambassador do that or something. This matter is way above my pay grade. I was ordered by Minister Than to draft a Five-Year Plan ASAP for President Thieu to take it to President Nixon and I intend to do just that. Either you help us quick or wish me luck to find a go---mn communist five-year planner somewhere to assist us.”
And that’s how Dr. Bolton ended up giving the MLRAD a top-notched, dynamic, young planning team and working fourteen to sixteen hours a day until the wee hours we completed the massive, coherent, and detailed plan in a couple months, complete with English translation. Only one writer did the narrative to keep it homogeneous, while nine fellows gathering data and facts from the nine directorates, and another dozen individuals collecting needed facts from the provinces. Then my whole team pieced together all the pertinent data and facts according to the format laid out by Dr. Bolton. I then proceeded to translate this voluminous plan into English. It was no easy task. After I finished the job – a 10-volume plan that stacked up to a yard high -- I gave it to Dr. Bolton to assess the result of the work and to secure USAID help in printing it in English because our typists could not type English fast. This was pre-computer and pre-word-processor time. He came back the next day and said, “Dr. Minh, your plan is excellent, but your English stinks. Did they ever teach you anything at OSU?” I came back with, “Listen, I went there to study veterinary medicine not English. I cannot help it. You guys should have sent me to Harvard or Yale as I wanted years ago. Anyway, Dr. Bolton, you just have a new assignment: editing the English version of the South Viet Nam’s ‘excellent’, your words not mine, Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan. Do you want me to call Bob Sweet to amend your contract?” And so with Dr. Bolton’s editing, President Thieu had his big well-edited plan on time to go to his Summit Meeting and the DGA had an experienced and dynamic planning team.
When he bid me farewell during the dark days of April 1975 while I was at my last job as Head of the National Food Administration (NFA) and he was still my American adviser there, Dr. Bolton mused, “Dr. Minh, you know what, I still think your Five-Year Plan was your greatest legacy and if the communists are smart, they will make good use of it.” Years later after the fall of South Viet Nam on a short visit there to see for the last time my beloved dying mother, I saw evidence that they used a lot of programs in that “excellent” plan. The proletariat might be good at dictatorship, but its agricultural development planning ability stank worse than my English translation!
I will never forget my last conversation with my mom. She was in and out of coma and when she was lucid the last time, she said, “I did not tell you to come home, son. Don’t come back anymore until there is a regime change.” I reassured her, “I had to see you to thank you for everything you did for me, Mom. Don’t you dare to die on me before I am able to pay back for everything I owed you, Mom, or else I will never forgive you.” To that she said, “You have already, son.” I marveled, “How’s that, Mom.” She managed to murmur before drifting back into her coma, “By living up to all my hopes and dreams. That’s all I ever wanted from you, son. And nothing else.” My Mom was bitter to the very end about the communist taking over our country and confiscating all my Dad’s businesses (his farmers’ co-op, his rural bank, his feed mill, his two big poultry farms, his hatcheries) and properties (his mansion, his sugar cane plantation, his cars, trucks, tractors).
THE ACCELERATED MIRACLE RICE PRODUCTION PROGRAM (Part II)
Main Focus
The MLRAD’s Secretariat General did not have to change a word of the DGA’s Plan when it reached there. With the planning out of the picture, I was able now to devote full time to the ongoing implementation of the major development programs of that plan.
At this point, I would like to tell you how I went about overcoming quickly all the difficulties stemming from the usual turf war in any South Vietnamese organization. At that time the South Vietnamese society was a pretty fragmented society with animosity between Southerners, Northerners, Central Vietnamese akin to the Yankees and Rebels in this country years ago, resentment between French-trained, American-trained, and local-trained technocrats, friction between old and young generations, suspicion between different religious backgrounds, competition between various political allegiances… Ambassador Bunker always commented negatively on this fact in his reports.
Let me tell you how a thirty-four-year old, American-trained, Buddhist Southerner led with success and pizzazz the biggest organization in the South Vietnamese government. When Minister Than asked me if I wanted to be the DGA chief because Mr. Pham huy Lan was too old and not very dynamic and the focus now was agricultural development and not land reform any more, knowing that it would be a demotion for me—going from the third to the sixth highest-ranking position in the Ministry, I said, “I served the nation at your pleasure, Mr. Minister. Wherever you think I can contribute the most, I’ll gladly comply. However, I have one favor to ask of you: I’d like to have Mr. An for my second in command.” He concurred wholeheartedly if I could somehow convince him to join me down there. Mr. Nguyen Van An was the current Deputy Secretary General, a fifth-ranking official of the Ministry with thirty years of service and also a Southern agronomist trained in-country, who enjoyed great respect and deference from the Ministry rank-and-files due to his age and length of service and who was, understandably, well-versed in the intricacies of our red tape maze. It would be a demotion for him also to be seventh-ranking under a young buck like me.
So, knowing that he loved American beer, I stopped by his house the following evening with a six-pack of Budweiser and some snack foods. While we were downing his favorite drink and gnawing on the famous Thu Duc pickled meat (nem Thu Duc) I asked him about each of the nine Directors -- most of who were much older than I was, with some as old as my father -- that I would lead: their strengths and weaknesses, their likes and dislikes, their style of leadership, their skeletons in the closet if any, and what made them tic. Then after An downed his fourth beer compared to my second, I popped my proposition, “Cu An, (respectful and endearing address Vietnamese use vis-à-vis an elderly person) the Minister wanted to put me in charge of the DGA because he promoted Lan to be Assistant Minister and named me as his replacement. I told him that I only accept the job if I could get you to help me run that behemoth. You know that the Minister, you, and I are the only Southern leaders of this entire important outfit of our government. If I could not succeed in this important assignment, the other folks would laugh their heads off at us, Southerners, and they will think that we are a bunch of incapable nincompoops. You are like my Dad, so I will give you due respect you deserve and let you pretty much manage the administrative and financial machineries and deal with the nine directors on my behalf in order for me to have all the time I need to push the implementation of the programs at the grass roots level where things are getting done and done the fastest. So what do you say?” After a short thinking pause and knowing how I performed in the Accelerated Protein Production Program and the Land To The Tiller Program earlier and realized what an important job this would be for the survival of our regime, the prosperity of our country, and the future of our people, he extended his hand for a handshake and said, “It’s a deal if you keep the American beer coming. Please, also ask the Minister to tell the Secretary General not to decrease my salary.” To that I replied with the biggest smile you ever saw because I have succeeded in overcoming the biggest hurdle at the helm of the most important organization of our government. I would be the first non-agronomist and at 35 the youngest director general in the history of the DGA.
And so with Bob Sweet bringing me my weekly supply of PX beer for An, I had a loyal and efficient Deputy Director General who effectively dealt with the labyrinthine South Vietnamese red tape, pulled a lot of strings at the Secretariat General where he came from, kept my Directors in check and in line, cooperating, and performing better than I expected, and protected my back and flanks so that I could scurry around all over the provinces to push and inspect the implementation of the myriad of the MLRAD programs because this was where the rubber met the asphalt, exactly as President Park recommended us to do to build our nation as he did so successfully with South Korea.
I overheard An, whose office was right behind mine, telling many a times some of my recalcitrant Directors over the phone to shape up when they slacked off or he could not protect them from me giving them an early retirement in order to bring in my own people, something people in position of authority like a directorship feared the most. As a result, I did not have to fire any head honchos and my DGA was performing at peak efficiency and achieved fantastic results.
Minister Than was also very good at promoting young deserving people throughout his portfolio based strictly on merit and accomplishment. The case in point: He named Pham Thanh Kham as Director of Agriculture, the most important of the 9 directorates of the DGA as this outfit implemented more than half of the myriad of agricultural sector development programs. Kham was young, dynamic, and as hard-working official at the DGA as me because he was the only one director who had put in as many overtime hours and as many travels to the far corners of our country as I had done.
I always gave my managerial people the credit of any accomplishment whether they deserved it or not and I was willing to accept the blame for any screw up from my people. I did things that no one else had done in our culture. For example, it was customary for lower echelons people to give gifts to higher echelon officials during holidays. I did just the opposite: I gave my Directors gifts during those times and any other times that I wanted to thank them for anything they did above and beyond the call of duty. My father was a very rich poultry farmer who also owned a sugar cane plantation, a rural bank, and a feed mill and I regularly drew salary from him as a technical adviser even though I had not done a whole lot of work for him as busy as I was working for the government and teaching at the college. So I could afford this. And if they or someone else gave me anything, I would divide it up to my entourage instead of keeping all for myself.
A lot of managerial people in our government had the annoying habit of coming to work late and going home early, and thus causing their employees to behave likewise, bringing disgust to people who worked hard. So, efficiency and productivity of public service suffered as a result. I put an end to that habit by ordering that the DGA employees working in the sprawling compound to assemble at 8:00 AM sharp for the daily salute to the flag complete with the national anthem playing and the entrance gate to be locked afterwards just as Minister Than did at the MLRAD compound. The gate keeper on duty would record all late comers and/or early leavers to be used for year-end performance assessment. I sealed all minor entrances and escape routes to and from that sprawling compound for ease of control of illicit incomings and outgoings. I took the unprecedented and unpopular measure to enforce my directives to impose work place discipline myself at all directorates. Thank God I did not have to do a whole lot of that because basically Vietnamese are very patriotic people and they need is strong and uncompromising leadership.
My people not only respected me but they also loved the way I ran a very taut ship and was always first to come and last to leave. When I left the DGA because President Thieu named me Vice-Minister of Agriculture, a lot them were teary eyes and some, especially An, even said that I was the best doggone DGA they ever had. I thanked An and reassured him that if I ever became Minister, he would still be my second in command because everybody seemed to think that where I would be heading next.
The number one program that I spent a lot of time and effort to push was the Accelerated Miracle Rice Production Program (AMRPP) because rice was the main staple of our people, and prior to 1964, had been our main export. We just could not import an average of 435,000 MT of rice a year, especially with the Americans pulling out. South Vietnamese people are one of the highest consumers of processed rice in the world according to FAO: 15 kg (29 lbs) per person per month or 276 kg (607 lbs) of paddy per year, probably because they eat all kinds of noodles and food products made with rice. When I was the DGA Chief, the program was already in full swing thanks to the efforts of Minister of Agriculture Ton That Trinh and later Minister of Land Reform and Agriculture Development Cao Van Than. Actually, it was Minister Trinh, a well-known French-trained agronomist and former Dean at the college where I was Department Head, who named the new high-yield varieties THAN NONG, the godfather of agriculture.
When President Thieu brought Minister Cao Van Than in to carry out the Land To The Tiller Program, his landmark land reform program, the main focus was shifted to this rural social revolution effort for a couple of years as the new name Ministry of Land Reform and Agriculture Development (MLRAD) indicated, but the momentum of the Accelerated Miracle Rice Production Program (AMRPP) was not greatly affected because our government gave a lot of priority to reach rice self-sufficiency and to resume the export of rice again as a good source of foreign exchange.
There are two main ways of increasing rice production: 1) Increase acreage of rice growing; 2) Apply modern technology to rice farming on the existing acreage of rice land. We chose the second approach due to the wartime situation. So the MLRAD opted for the strategy of using high-yield varieties of rice and the application of modern agricultural methods since this approach was faster, even though it was more expensive because it required costly agri-inputs like fertilizers and insecticides as well as farm machineries and credits. The first approach was not feasible nor practical because it required a lot of military interventions to pacify the countryside, a slow and difficult process at best, demanded a lot of farm labor which was lacking due to military draft by both sides of the conflict, and called for the kind of expenditure in money and in time, which we could not afford, for big land reclamation projects.
We needed to produce roughly 6,100,000 metric tons of rice paddy as soon as possible to cover the demand of 17,000,000 people at that time. Once that was achieved, we could resume the export of rice. In the past, “Saigon rice” was preferred the world over due to its high quality. These high-quality rice varieties were notoriously low-yield—one to two metric tons per hectare. So rice scientists in our country and throughout the world were feverishly researching to create new improved varieties of both high-yield and better eating-quality.
It’s worth opening some parentheses here to mention how South Viet Nam was one of the first countries that launched the so-called Green Revolution in Asia. In mid-1967 there was a big flood following a bad typhoon in the District of Vo Dat in Binh Tuy Province in Military Region III near Saigon that caused massive damage to the first rice crop. Since the Vo Dat valley was tucked in a secluded area, the Ministry of Agriculture under Minister Ton That Trinh agreed with USAID to try planting a newly created and introduced high-yield and short-maturation rice variety called IR-8, without fearing some untoward consequences to the country’s rice varieties should some adverse genetic or biological effect happen unexpectedly from that trial.
This new rice variety was developed by the Philippines International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) that had been set up and financed by the Ford and Rockfeller Foundations. It took very-high and prolonged negotiation between the USA and the Philippines before the Filipino government allowed six metric tons of IR-8 seeds to be sent to South Viet Nam and to be planted on some 120 ha (300 acres) of rice fields. It took no less than President Johnson’s personal intervention with President Ferdinand Marcos to circumvent Filipino law to effect that transfer. Because of late planting and lack of water in the dry season, only forty hectares (100 acres) were able to produce only a disappointing average yield of two metric tons per hectares (1,760lbs/acre), which was half of the expected average yield of that high yield strain. So the entire 80 tons of harvested IR-8 seeds were bought back from farmers and distributed to thirty rice-producing provinces to be planted in the 1968 rainy season (Summer-Fall crop).
After that, the farmers were expected to multiply the seeds themselves once they realized the profit they could make from the high yield they got. Meanwhile the Rice Service of the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) would use the USAID-provided Revolving Fund to pay for the IR-8 seeds to propagate in other rice-producing areas in the dry season (Winter-Spring crop) of 1969. As a result, the 1968-1969 planting cycle saw an official 23,373 ha (roughly 60,000 acres) of IR-8 (renamed TN-8 = Than Nong 8 by Minister Trinh) planted with an expected average yield of four metric tons per hectare (3,500 lbs/acre). I said official because we had no record as to how much TN-8 the farmers planted on their own outside the government-sponsored program, but it was substantial. This was the parting shot of the Green Revolution that would be heard throughout Asia. Of course, the communists tried their utmost best to disrupt this program that made it so hard to carry it out. But thank to the success of Pacification and specially the determination and dedication of the implementers, this program made great stride towards its goal of bringing South Viet Nam rapidly back rice self-sufficiency.
With this initial success born out of a disaster and with the valuable assistance of USAID, the MLRAD, (the renamed MoA under Minister Than), launched the Accelerated Miracle Rice Production Program, the most massive undertaking of our ministry. The next growing season of 1969-1970, saw 510,000 acres (or 204,000 ha) of high yield rice varieties planted. This acreage more than doubled again the following season of 1970-1971 with 1,130,000 acres (452,100 ha) of high yield varieties planted. Under my leadership the acreage of Miracle Rice was successively brought to 1,687,000 acres (674,740 ha) in the 1971-1972 harvest and 2,087,000 acres (835,000 ha) in the 1972-1973 harvest then finally to 2,225,000 acres (890,000 ha) in the 1973-2974 harvest. The 1974-1975 harvest season saw an estimated 2,385,000 acres (950,000 ha) planted Miracle Rice within the government program. There was no way of knowing the acreage of high yield rice planting outside the official program, but it was substantial. It is worth to note that North Viet Nam in those days was only one year behind us in planting TN-8 and any other high-yield variety as Le Duan made as big an effort to introduce them to North Viet Nam as he was adamant in wrecking our effort in the South. It was the only thing we outdid him in that stupid war.
To achieve a rapid increase of high-yield rice production like that, the DGA channeled most of its human and material resources down to the Mekong Delta, the South East Asia rice basket, where nearly 65 % of our people (or roughly 11,000,000) lived at that time and also around the few provinces near the capital of Saigon for ease of transportation of the produced staple to this main center of consumption of some 3 million people. The Mekong Delta at that time was the most secure region of our country except the remote and sparsely populated areas in about 1/3 of the provinces that harbored at most 50,000 guerillas. So a lot of agricultural development work could be carried out there.
I put all my best young NAI graduates there to run the local services, experiment stations, extension services, demonstration sites, and special projects. The great majority of the graduates of the Superior School of Agriculture, Forestry, and Animal Science (later renamed National Agriculture Institute), where I was still teaching, were recruited and employed, some as specialists in certain projects with special out-of-budget funding provided by USAID. I specifically fought for these young men’s military deferment and our government realized that their service was more valuable in the civilian sectors than in the armed forces, considering the investment our government spent in training them—all our public university training was free. The agricultural sector enjoyed this unique favor all through the war years. The graduates of draft age were drafted and trained as reserve officers, but the Ministry of Defense always transferred them back to our different organizations upon our Ministry’s request. I made it a point that, if those who were recruited for our programs did not perform well, I would not want them back in our rural revolution endeavor since this is the most vital work for the prosperity of our nation if not its survival.
The Mekong Delta also received a lot of USAID’s financial and material support in agricultural development. Many American field operators and experts in different agricultural fields were also assigned in MR IV and its provinces, especially in Can Tho City of Phong Dinh Province, the hub and heart of the Mekong Delta region. Most of the programs and projects of our Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan were found in abundance there for obvious reason.
A good portion of my life was spent in the Mekong Delta, especially in Chau Doc Province, my birth place and where my Mom’s family’s roots were planted and An Giang Province, the birth place of the Phat Gia Hoa Hao Buddhist Sect with whom I derived a lot of support due to my uncle who was a high-ranking official in their military and political organization, and Kien Giang Province where 50,000 Northern Vietnamese catholic farmers’ families were resettled by President Ngo Dinh Diem after the Geneva Accords that partitioned Viet Nam into two parts along the 17th Parallel.
My uncle was the Lower House Agriculture Chairman.
Implementation
So, how did the DGA ramp up to implement the MLRAD’s signature agricultural development program?
Rice growing was always a most arduous, time-consuming, and precise undertaking. Growing traditional rice was hard enough, but growing the new high-yield variety is doubly more demanding. But, we were blessed by having Vietnamese farmers who were very progressive, smart, patient, laborious, innovative, and adaptive. They were like Missourians of the Show Me state: you have to show them to convince them. So the preferred method of getting the farmers to switch to growing TN-8 rice was to set up demonstration plots to compare the yield of native rice and Miracle Rice side by side, preferably on farmers’ lands with work done by the co-operating farmers themselves, but with our technical assistance and agri-inputs.
Then once the farmers saw for themselves the spectacularly convincing results, which 2-3 times higher than traditional farming, we followed up with the Filipino model of Mini Rice Growing Kit used successfully in the Philippines with similar program. It consisted of a box of TN-8 seeds, N-P-K fertilizer, and Diazinon systemic insecticide with detailed instruction to grow a small plot of land for seeds that they could use in the next growing season. Our cadres visited these participating farmers on a regular basis throughout the growing season to make sure that the first trial was successful. Due to the fact that these demonstration plots were so well taken care of that some of them produced an incredible ten to eleven metric tons per hectare (almost 10,000 lbs per acre). I saw some government experiment stations sites using optimal technique under ideal conditions that were able to produce an astounding yield of fifteen metric ton per ha (13,000 lbs per acre). But, the average was 4-5 metric tons per hectares (2.2 acres). When farmers saw this kind of yield with their own eyes, even Ho Chi Minh himself could not prevent them from growing TN-8.
Rice farming was so ingrained in our rural culture that farmers through the ages had learned how to do it right by passing down generations after generations these verses or sayings of wisdom that were easy to remember. For example, the four factors that assured success of rice growing were succinctly covered in decreasing order of importance by the verse: “Nhut nuoc, nhi phan, tam can, tu giong” meaning “Firstly water, secondly fertilizer, thirdly care (or labor), fourthly seeds.” But, this was true only for traditional rice and subsistence rice farming.
For growing high-yield rice in commercial setting we needed much more than that as experimentation clearly and repeatedly had shown. So, I came up with the additional four more modern essential agri-inputs for growing new high-yield rice varieties in commercial farming in the following parallel verse to teach cadres and farmers: “Ngu thuoc, luc tien, that co, bac thi” meaning “Fifthly medicines (for plants: insecticide/fungicide/herbicide), sixthly money (farm credit), seventhly machines (farm implements and machineries), eighthly market (government rice trade policy)”. I did not fully realize the paramount importance of the government rice trade policy until the severe food crisis of 1973 happened, oddly enough, at a time when I was so sure that self-sufficiency was already achieved, and with my last job when I was put in charge of implementing the Rice Marketing Program to carry out the Ministry of Trade and Industry’s new rice trade policy under Minister Nguyen Duc Cuong.
THE ACCELERATED MIRACLE RICE PRODUCTION PROGRAM (Part III)
Water: (Nhut Nuoc)
No living thing can live without water, and rice is no exception. The average rice paddy requires 500 gallons (roughly 2,000 liters) of water to produce a pound (roughly less than ½ kg) of rice. Therefore rice growing using irrigation and drainage demands 10,000-15,000 cubic meters of water per hectare (6,000-9,000 cubic feet per acre). Upland rice requires less water—600 cubic meters per hectare (900 cubic feet per acre).
The Mekong Delta produces an excess amount of rice because it is blessed with an abundance of water from the mighty Mekong River system. South Viet Nam is the terminal end of this river, so the whole delta was generated from the silt deposit through eons. The land is very fertile. The Mekong forks into two major navigable rivers when it reaches South Viet Nam then breaks up again into nine smaller branches before dumping its silt-laden water load into the South China Sea. That’s why in Viet Namese we call the Mekong River Song Cuu Long or the Nine-Dragon River.
Traditionally there are two growing seasons in the South: the monsoon, wet or rainy season also called Summer-Fall harvest from May to October; the dry season or Winter-Spring harvest from November to April of the following year. However, with short-maturing, new high-yield rice varieties that mature only in 90-100 days and irrigation that makes water available all the time, the seasons blur with year round planting possible in many areas in proximity to the rivers or the irrigation canals. Rainy season growing depending on “sky water” is more precarious due to the ever-present threat of destructive and disruptive flood caused by typhoons.
The vast and flat Mekong Delta is crisscrossed by a complex canal system built throughout the ages that diverts river water to remote lands or drains stagnant acid water from land-locked distant areas. It provides transportation by sampans or boats in areas devoid of rural roads. The Mekong Delta has some 4,000 miles of natural and man-made waterways big and small at that time.
During the dry season, farmers use irrigation from man-powered or mechanical pumps to bring river or canal or even well water into their fields, especially those located on water-deficient areas (dry lands, remote areas far from waterways, and high lands).
Our Directorate of Farm Irrigation was doing a superb job of water management including water conservation. Old canals had to be improved, new canals had to be dug, and water rights had to be established. The right kind of water pumps had to be used. Since water is the most essential element of rice farming, farmers had to be constantly trained by our farm water management experts.
2. Fertilizer: (Nhì Phân)
Fertilizer is the food of any plant. We can use natural fertilizer like nutrients in the silt that the river deposits in flooded rice fields every year. On the other hand farmers also make good use of human and large or small animals’ wastes (urine and manure of pig, cattle, water buffaloes, chicken, ducks) or even algae and legumes. This is appropriate for traditional farming using native rice strains especially at subsistence level, but totally inadequate for commercial farming using very demanding nitrogen-responsive high-yield new varieties.
Chemical fertilizer, usually of a mixture containing nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in various proportions depending on the soil analysis of where it is used, is mandatory for growing new high-yield varieties to achieve maximal production. Its timely, adequate, and appropriate use is essential for successful commercial high-yield rice farming. Farmers had to be taught by our cadres about all of this on a relentless basis and in a massive scale every year.
Since one pound of N-P-K fertilizer is required to produce ten to fifteen pounds of rice, to bring about the full potential of high-yield varieties, it is recommended to use 250 kg of N-P-K fertilizer per hectare (220 lbs of N-P-K per acre). Most farmers could not afford that expense, especially in the beginning of the program. So they used different lesser amounts. Also there was the perennial question of availability and affordability of these commodities at a time of raging war. Chemical fertilizer was an imported agri-input, making its price high unless it was subsidized. The government chose to subsidize this commodity to increase rice production at the fastest pace. On the hand, its availability was low unless the farmers were situated close to the commercial agri-input depots, usually located in cities or towns (both province and district) or farmers co-ops’ sites. The easy access of this vital and costly commodity was always a controlling factor for the Miracle Rice program implementers. This fact was in the back of the mind of every official responsible for the implementation of this program at the grassroots level.
The Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) devoted an important portion of the government foreign exchange to the importation of fertilizer: More than 200,000 metric tons were imported in 1967, 230,000 metric tons in 1968, 483,000 metric tons in 1969, and 502,000 metric tons in 1970. More would be needed in succeeding years as the hectareage of Miracle Rice sharply increased. Just these four above-mentioned amounts of fertilizers could have theoretically produced more than 21,200,000 metric tons of rice in these four years if properly applied.
This was why the DGA of the MLRAD had been putting forth relentless efforts to develop agri-input depots by the private sector merchants, farms’ co-ops, and farmers’ unions closer and closer to the end-users, which were Miracle Rice farmers. Learning from my past experience in successfully promoting the private sector participation in our Accelerated Protein Production Program in 1967, I had numerous meetings with local private sector investors and the banking system from rural banks to agricultural development banks, and commercial banks, as well as farms’ co-ops and unions in all the sixteen provinces in the Mekong Delta. I told my service chiefs to do likewise and I would not fault them in this effort as officials were reluctant to deal with the private sector for fear of being accused of connivance or collusion. I taught them how to do it right in an open and public manner with the involvement of the local legislative people.
The distribution of fertilizer as other vital agri-inputs had to be turned over to the commercial private sector and farmers’ organizations to be more efficient and economical or free of graft and corruption. That was why in 1967, the Tenant Farmers’ Association distributed thirty per cent of the fertilizers imported that years to their members and more in subsequent years.
Our Directorate of Crops Production and Protection (DCPP) and Directorate of Agricultural Extension (DAE) were consumed in this priority program as in other programs in training farmers about the ins and outs of modern farming. We were blessed to have two dynamic and knowledgeable thirtyish Directors in charge of these Directorates and they were working at least as hard as I was in propelling this AMRPP in overdrive. There was never any rest for the weary. These guys were always a step ahead of me, especially Mr. Pham Thanh Kham, the DCPP Director, which was not easy to do.
3. Labor: (Tam Cần)
Rice farming, especially high-yield rice farming, is a most labor-intensive, back-breaking, and exacting agri-business undertaking. No wonder one farmers’ saying loudly proclaims, “Mot hat thoc vang chin hat mo hoi” meaning “One golden rice paddy grain requires nine drops of sweat.” And sweating the farmers do all day long, sometimes way into the night during certain times. It’s an early-dawn-until-late-dusk business with few welcome short breaks in between. A modern farmer must be an agronomist, an economist, a meteorologist, a businessman, a farm equipment mechanic, and a laborer lumped into one.
Not only that, it’s also the most risky business endeavor since it’s subjected to so many unpredictable vagaries of nature: flood, drought, typhoon, untimely rain, infestation by insects, infection by diseases, ravage by pests (birds, rodents, land crabs, snails, fish). In war time, damage could be wrought by churning military amphibious vehicles and wading troops.
For labor, farmers first rely on family’s and relatives’ labor during peak labor requirement times (land preparation, seedling planting, harvest time, insect control spraying, weeding). Wife, kids, parents are enlisted into the chores. Time-sensitive activities required hired labor. Farmers do a lot of exchange labor with friends, neighbors, colleagues, and relatives. Of course, if farmers are well-off they could have draft animals like cattle (oxen, water-buffaloes) for land preparation and transportation.
Human labor was always at premium and constituted a limiting factor in war time due to military draft by both sides of the conflict. Americans always complained about the high desertion rate of our armed forces. But, like most armies, ours was also a peasant-based army. During peak-labor time, our soldiers did come home to help their parents with urgent farming chores. Fighting and killing enemies, even sworn ones had to wait. This happened with both sides. If Ho Chi Minh with all the cruelty of his coercive and oppressive machinery could not prevent this infraction by his guerillas, there was no way that Nguyen Van Thieu with the compassion of his religion and the humanity of his regime could do any better. It was a matter of survival of the family. I saw this all the time in my wanderings in the boonies and a lot of our officers at all levels were empathetic to the need. I often saw whole platoons or companies of RF (Regional Forces) or PF (Popular Forces) teamed up to help farmers doing harvest chores as their civic actions in order to have everybody stick together as a unit in case of need.
To alleviate this labor constraint, the government promoted mechanization of farming operations at different stages. High yield rice farming required a lot of labor-saving machines due to the double or triple or quadruple yield and increased amount of work.
Our Directorate of Farm Co-operatives and Farmers’ Unions did their utmost to organize farmers with a view to:
1) capitalize and maximize farmers’ labor and resources;
2) increase their bargaining power in buying their products and selling their crops;
3) minimize their expenses on acquisition of labor-saving equipment. Even our Rural Development Cadres (RDC’s) sometimes helped out in their heart-and-mind-winning efforts.
I also saw local former landowners who invested in procuring farm machineries for hire or for rent with their compensation money as their new lucrative money-making enterprise that farmers loved instead of hated.
4. Seeds: (Tứ Giống)
South Viet Nam had hundreds of good quality rice varieties famous all over the world commonly known overseas as “Saigon Rice”, but yield was low (one to two metric tons per hectare or two and a half acres) and maturation was long (five to seven months).
There were long grain, short grain, and medium grain, slender grain and round grain varieties. There were aromatic and non-aromatic strains. There were white, red, purple, and charcoal species. There were sticky and non-sticky types. There were short- stemmed rice varieties growing in high lands, and twelve-foot long-stemmed rice varieties floating in deeply flooded fields. There were salty-water rice kinds that grow in the proximity of estuaries and acid-stagnant-water rice kinds that thrive in land-locked fields. There were some 800 different local varieties of rice with suggestive, descriptive, and weird names.
But the main effort of the MLRAD was to launch the Green Revolution (growing the high-yield varieties developed by IRRI scientists to stamp out hunger in the third world) on a large scale and at a rapid pace to increase rice production. The goal was to gradually replace wherever possible the native strains of rice by high-yield and short-maturation new varieties of rice. The first focus was on quantity production until self-sufficiency and then later, after this was achieved, we would work on quality production.
The first high-yield rice variety, developed by Dr. Chang, an IRRI rice geneticist, was IR-8, later renamed TN-8 (Than Nong 8) by MoA Minister Ton That Trinh after the patron saint of Viet Namese agriculture, Than Nong. TN-8 was followed in short order by TN-5 (more suitable for deep water field due to its long stem), TN-20, TN-22 (better cooking and eating quality), TN73-1, TN73-2 (more insect-resistant, shorter maturation)
TN-8 had many shortcomings: the amylose content is too high (28 %) making the cooked rice too hard to swallow when cold; the plant stem is too short, thus unsuitable for deeply flooded rice field; the grain is too short and too big unlike the long slender grain of expensive rice varieties that the export market loves. And it’s not aromatic as some of the premium quality rice species are.
Although IR-8 was poor for eating because it got hard too soon when it was cold, it was wonderful for making oodles of noodles—fine noodle, small noodle, medium noodle, large noodle, flat noodle, round noodle, sheet noodle. The noodle strands were strong and resilient. They did not break off and get mushy in the soup. And Viet Namese--Northern, Southern, Central--love to eat noodles. They eat noodles in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, and even far into the night. They eat noodle appetizers, noodle entrees, and noodle desserts. And Vietnamese can reel off the names of at least three dozen noodle dishes they eat. Just Pho soups alone have no fewer than a dozen variants. When I worked with my people late into the night I had to take them to the Pho shops at midnight or else they would not volunteer to stay on after quitting time or could not last until the wee hours to complete all kinds of projects in time or, more importantly, on time because they did not get any overtime pay of any kind. These young technocrats – most of them were my former students – worked above and beyond the call of duty because they liked, admired, and respected their boss. All I could say was that noodles played a big role in getting our government programs moving along at a breakneck pace in those days wherever I went and whatever I did.
Our Rice Service in the DCPP headed by a bright young agronomist and rice specialist named Tran Van Dat, Minister Trinh’s favorite student, who did a superb job in testing and experimenting with new rice seeds and in setting up spectacular demonstration plots to train cadres and farmers through its many research stations and training centers. They came up with a lot of ways of optimizing and maximizing yield of the new varieties as no one knew how they fared in actual growing conditions in commercial setting. I helped to send Dat to the UC-Davis to get his PhD in rice agronomy by intervening with Minister Than because the bureaucracy wanted to send someone else. Dat later became an FAO rice expert manager of world renown.
Our Directorate of Research under the capable and learned leadership of Dr. Thai Cong Tung also contributed immensely in the seed acclimatization and multiplication effort, not only rice seeds but many other crop seeds in its many research stations throughout the country.
These technocrats were instrumental in coming up with what, where, when, and how we could plant two, three, even four crops a year with the least cost and the most chance of success, the lowest risk, and the highest yield. They were able to show for all to see that we could produce an astounding fifteen metric tons of rice paddy per hectare under optimal and ideal conditions that they came up with. It was mind-boggling to think about the possibility of modern scientific farming.
5. Insecticides/Fungicides/Herbicides: (Ngũ Thuốc)
For plants, insecticides and fungicides are like medicines to human or animals. Bugs, and Viet Nam had buckets of them, did bug the new non-resistant Miracle Rice plants to death. Sometimes, there were epidemics of certain insect infestations -- especially when the import of insecticides was delayed for some reasons -- that caused widespread and extensive damage to rice crops in biblical proportion, which necessitated coordinated efforts by all concerned to stamp them out and to contain the damage.
Our extension cadres were performing a superb job of training our farmers on managing the Miracle Rice strains and they spent a lot of time in the boonies learning how to do this since everything was new to all of us also. As a college professor, I was big on training people: our agricultural cadres at different provincial services, Rural Development (RD) cadres of the village government, farmers’ coops and farmers’ unions people, and most importantly, progressive farmers. Once farmers saw that their neighbors achieve the kind of mind-boggling yield that these progressive had, the tedious struggle of agricultural modernization was won at that hamlet. We then moved out to nearby hamlets like a drop of oil on the water surface.
Our crop protection specialists at the Crop Protection Service under the DCPP were always on the lookout everywhere for first signs of trouble. Insect infestation was more effectively dealt with preventive measures and early control than trying to deal with it when it was widespread and full-blown. They found out that TN-8, unlike later varieties or our native rice, was very susceptible to tough Viet Namese insects. Some problems had to be dealt with at night under torch light to be effective because if we waited until daylight it would be too late because the larvae already penetrated the rice plant.
On the other hand, heavy use of chemical fertilizer also promoted rapid growth of weeds in the rice fields. This necessitated mandatory use of herbicides. Hand picking was totally unsatisfactory mainly due to lack of labor. This task was essential to reduce fertilizer waste and to optimize paddy production.
Therefore, to assure success of this type of rice farming, we had to import very expensive, highly health-hazardous, greatly environment-degrading insecticides and herbicides and other minor plant protection chemicals. Sometimes overzealous and ignorant farmers misused these chemicals that resulted in severe problems such as the catastrophic destruction of fish and snails that were part of their diet and other living creatures that were links in the long food chain. This necessitated more training and regulatory works to minimize the adverse side effects to the environment and people’s health.
The MTI and the MLRAD considered these agri-inputs availability top priority. They worked closely to make sure that progressive farmers of Miracle Rice had easy and timely access to these necessary commodities at the usual private sector outlets of NPK fertilizer close to end-users. Meanwhile, our government worked hard to facilitate in-country manufacturing and compounding of these products by local commercial outfits. As I remember, we were promoting biodegradable products more friendly to environment and humans. In 1969, $450,000 worth of insecticides were imported and in 1970, that figure doubled to $900,000.
Our government made a significant step in reducing import by helping the private sector set up the first environment-friendly biodegradable systemic insecticide (Diazinon) manufacturing plant in country in 1972. The second plant producing another similar biodegradable systemic insecticide (Furadan) was built in 1973. Three domestic fertilizer blending plants were constructed, two in 1972, one in 1973.
6. Money or Credit: (Lục Tiền)
Any business enterprise requires credit and commercial rice farming, especially high-yield rice variety that requires costly inputs, is no exception. Yet our farmers, just as farmers anywhere else in the third world, made up the poorest segment of our society, eking out a subsistence living with zero collateral. High-yield rice growing necessitates relatively high cash outlay to be successful, which usually amounted to 25 % of the value of the crop produced. Traditionally, tenant farmers got credits or advances from landlords or loan sharks at exorbitantly high interest rate. But after the land reform program they were now landowners themselves and needed other sources of credit.
Since farming is a risky proposition at best due to unpredictable and uncontrollable vagaries of nature, usual commercial sources of credit like commercial banks are out of reach for farmers. But oddly enough, from our experience, farmers were more worthy as borrowers than other folks! My father told me that his Rural Bank in Lai Thieu District hardly lost any loan money from farmers because he always gave them a second chance, a strategy he called “nurturing the debtor to erase the debt” (Nuoi no de tru no).
To fill this void, special governmental or quasi-governmental sources of credit had to be made available to farmers close to their villages, particularly during the start-up phase of their business enterprise of growing Miracle Rice. Thus, national credit unions, agricultural development banks, and rural banks were born. The original National Credit Unions (Quoc Gia Nong Tin Cuoc) set up by the Diem Regime were inadequate. So with loans from the Asian Development Bank, our Agricultural Development Banks (ADB = Ngan Hang Phat Trien Nong Nghiep) were developed. Still that was not satisfactory nor sufficient. Therefore, the rural banks, created according to the Filipino model in order to mobilize private capital, were set in district towns closer to farmers. Even though half of the money of these private banks came from the ADB and the training was done by the ADB, these banks operated under the new banking law without interference from the government. The ADB supervised their operations to make sure they did business according to the law. These banks were more responsive to the needs of farmers. The Village Administrative Committee (Hoi Dong Xa) even played a role in processing the loan applications of farmers.
Farms’ Co-operatives and Farmers’ Union also provided credit to their members according to their means. Agricultural credits were made available to needy farmers on an increasing basis for a wide range of farming and trading activities.
The amounts loaned showed how fast the program was growing: 1968: VN$4.13 billion, 1969: VN$4.62 billion, 1970: VN$6 billion, 1971: VN$10.067 billion (to 170,611 farmers and fishermen), 1972: VN$18.924 billion (to 202,714 farmers and fishermen), 1973: VN$26.4 billion (projected), 1974: VN$28.7 billion (projected) by the Agricultural Development Bank. Small non-collateralized loans averaged VN$25,000 or less, medium loans VN$50,000 or less, large loans VN$500,000 or less. Forty percent of this low interest credit was earmarked for rice production and three quarters of these loans were made to small farmers without collateral. By the end of the year more than three fourths of the outstanding loans were repaid in full.
There were also forty eight rural banks loaning VN$3.35 billion to 23,818 farmers and fishermen. These banks were very popular with our farmers because they were set up at the district level much closer to the farmers. The owners of these banks were usually people who did business with farmers or landowners who received large compensation money from the government and wanted to invest in another line of business. Under the new Rural Banking Law, the investors didn’t have to pay any kinds of taxes, fees, and interests for five years. My father, who owned a rural bank with his poultry business partner, said that farmers were the best clients he ever had because they were very reliable. They would pay back every penny they owed unless there were calamities, and even then, if given a second chance they would make it up. Farmers who could not have access to the above-mentioned source of funding were still able to secure private funding through traditional local lenders (grocery owners, local rice merchants, wealthy people…) at a higher rate, though not as high as before land reform.
7. Farm Machineries: (Thất Cơ)
Modern commercial farming requires high degree of mechanization of farm operations to reduce the cost of production, especially when the production is so high as with high-yield rice and to make up for the dearth of human and animal labor due to the constant war demands on labor.
To encourage mechanization, the MTI made its scarce foreign exchange reserve available as a top priority basis for the importation by the private sector of a large variety of farm machineries. I saw all sizes of tractors for dry field plowing and tilling of soil. Farmers also used small Japanese and Taiwanese tillers suitable for wet fields and even planters of seedlings. And for the first time, during harvest time one could see all kinds of mobile harvesters, transportable dryers, threshers, automatic millers, baggers parking along the highways to harvest and process the paddy. But the machine that we saw everywhere in our countryside was the water pumps. There were all types and all sizes of water pumps. We imported 40,000 water pumps of all sizes in 1967, 174,000 small gasoline engines in 1969, and 186,000 similar engines in 1970 and 1971. These machines not only were used for irrigation and draining of rice fields, but they were used also to motorize sampans, and boats of all sizes with some clever tinkering thanks to Viet Namese ingenuity. Water transportation in vast roadless remote areas of the Mekong Delta was godsend. In 1970, the Ministry of Economy (MoE) earmarked US$15,000,000 for the importation of farm machineries of all types. Last but not least, we imported big quantities of small farm implements like hand insecticide sprayers and herbicide applicators for the control of insects and weeds in millions of acres.
Our Directorate of Farm Mechanization was intimately involved in the development and promotion of all farm operations’ mechanization at all levels. They trained our local cadres, farm co-ops, and farmers’ unions, most of the time in collaboration with foreign manufacturers in the use, maintenance, and repair of all this farm machinery. They also did studies and research in optimizing and maximizing the use of mechanical means to complement and supplement farm labor. Our mechanical engineers invented quite a few simple machines themselves that could be duplicated easily in-country that would make farming chores less labor-intensive. They even helped local manufacturers produce some of these farm machineries and implements. They provided prototypes of simple machines used in private sector feed grain projects. As a result, we started to see the in-country manufacture and commercial sale of grain threshers, dryers, grinders, and irrigation pumps.
But thankfully, these large cash outlay acquisitions were covered by government-backed low-interest funding through its agricultural development and rural banking system. For qualified big farms’ co-ops and farmers’ unions, commercial funding was also available. I noticed also that quite a few enterprising individuals with financial means like former landlords did buy, on their own initiative with their compensation money, large or medium farm tractors or wet field tillers to prepare the soil for farmers, harvesters or mobile threshers, transportable dryers or portable millers to process paddy during harvest time at mutually agreed fees. They made a brisk and lucrative business during certain stages of the crop season.
However most of these essential activities were performed for farmers by their co-ops and unions or the farmers themselves once they made enough money to buy their own farm equipments, which more and more of them did. The case in point, most farmers ended up buying a Honda motorcycle for transportation in rural areas with the proceeds from planting Miracle Rice. That’s why they called high-yield Miracle Rice “Honda Rice”.
Our Directorate of Farm Co-operatives and Farmers’ Unions was quite busy organizing farmers into self-governing co-ops and unions to pool their limited resources together so that they could get loans for production agri-inputs at more affordable costs thanks to the economy of scale, be it fertilizer, insecticides, herbicides, or farm equipment, without going through any middlemen. Farmers’ co-ops and unions also strengthen their bargaining power during the marketing phase of the products of their labor. We were able to organize 30,000 farmers and fishermen into farmers’ co-operatives in 1972.
8. Market: (Bát Thị)
Several researchers are of the opinion that government rice trade policy is the number one deciding factor whether commercial rice farming is successful or not. Farmers invariably choose to revert to subsistence farming if there is artificial or arbitrary price control of rice that makes rice growing a non-profitable enterprise. The communists learned this lesson the hard way after their victory: ideology could not trump the law of economics and the proletariat could not dictate to the farmers to make them productive.
It turned out that for many years marketing was the weakest link of the AMRPP because the rice trade was tightly controlled by our government for obvious reason at that time because of the need to deny food to our sworn enemy. This tended to impede free movement of the rice trade and to discourage farmers’ production at commercial level as there was no incentive for them to do so. Not to mention the fact every time you put bureaucrats in the tight control of economic activities you create a fertile ground for graft and corruption. That is why one can see the same situation prevailing even to this day in the Philippines where high-yield rice varieties originated. There the government has to import every year about a million metric tons of rice to feed a hundred million people because the politicians want to control rice price to appease their urban constituents for votes. Other countries which control rice prices like Myanmar and Sri Lanka for political expediency are all rice importers.
It’s worth mentioning the case of Viet Nam, the only communist country that exports a lot of rice. Contrary to the dictum “Show me a communist country and I can tell you that it’s a country that could not feed its people”, Viet Nam is a communist country but not only it could feed its 93,000,000 people, but manages to be the number 1 export of rice in the world displacing Thailand from this top spot that it had been holding for a long time. So how this could happen?
Right after North Viet Nam took over South Viet Nam, it tried in earnest to collectivize the farmers. This rude and crude attempt to impose tight organization and control on farmers had been working in North Viet Nam because farmers there did not know any better, going as they had from being slaves of landlords to slaves of the state. But, in South Viet Nam, after the Land To The Tiller Program tore the yoke of land tenancy from their neck, the farmers enjoyed a few years of freedom and tasted free private enterprise blessings. They really liked what they experienced even though it was short-lived. And so when they were forced to give back their land titles and to be herded into more than 1,500 communes or co-ops and 9,350 Production Teams (Tap Doan San Xuat) in order to produce for the state at fixed price along the famous communist line of “From each according to his ability and to each according to his need”, things did not work out well. Even ignorant farmers saw through all these faked utopian promises.
So South Viet Nam was on the verge of starvation for more than a decade. My parents told me that people were forced to eat rice mixed with corn, yam, taro root, sorghum, and raw banana all these miserable years. Inflation shot up through the roof. When asked to produce according to their ability, all of a sudden farmers’ ability diminished to subsistence level production. They gradually killed their fruit trees and consumed their breeding stocks to avoid unreasonable taxation and arbitrary confiscation. Then when the people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe wised up and freed themselves, the Viet Namese Communist Party saw the writing on the wall and especially when they realized how well Teng Hsiao Ping’s market economy was doing in China. They followed suite with their 1988 Market Economy with its Socialistic Directive reform to free up the South Viet Namese farmers’ entrepreneurial spirit. Something they dubbed Doi Moi (New Change) and put an end to their “bao cap” (government subsidy and ration) regimen.
South Viet Nam re-exported almost a million tons of rice the following year and continued to do so to this day. This was not because of anything the communists were doing in developing agriculture, but because the free Second Republic of Viet Nam had accomplished that task more than a decade earlier. Through the relentless efforts of some 70,000 hard-working people toiling for the Ministry of Land Reform and Agriculture Development under the most trying conditions, the RVN had laid down the rock-solid foundation for agricultural development in the Mekong Delta in particular and for agriculture-based economic development of the nation in general. In doing so we whetted the farmers’ appetite for the blessings of a free private enterprise system of an ownership society that President Nguyen Van Thieu created through his rural social revolution. In every sense, this was a true REVOLUTION that changed completely a society much like the well-known American Revolution or the French Revolution -- even though it was a bloodless one.
These efforts left such an indelible mark in the farmers’ consciousness, belief, thinking, attitude, and behavior that not even the brutal, coercive, highhanded, and dictatorial communist doctrine could erase it. To paraphrase Churchill, they just simply hated the equal sharing of miseries after having tasted the unequal sharing of blessings under the Second Republic of Viet Nam. I like to say that this state of mind transcends the ideological boundaries and I am glad that our Ministry of Land Reform and Agriculture Development played a pivotal role in President Thieu’s social revolution that started it all.
I am not going to elaborate on how the Politburo and the Central Committee through a slew of decrees and edits finally gave the farmers back practically all the rights they enjoyed during the Second Republic of Viet Nam. Farmers again were allowed private ownership of means of production and given the rights to enjoy the fruits of their labor. They could not own their lands, but they had the rights to use the lands for twenty years if they grew annual crops and fifty years if they planted orchard trees, but they could turn it over to their descendants or exchange or lease it to someone else or mortgage their land-use rights during that time frame. The following year production increased by a million metric tons of rice and rice import ended. Chad Raymond, an assistant professor of political science at Elon Univeristy, North Carolina wrote an excellent paper about his field research in Viet Nam on the utter failure of NVN collectivization scheme entitled, “No Responsibility and No Rice: The Rise and Fall of Agricultural Collectivization in Viet Nam” published by the The Agricultural History Society. This peaceful resistance of the Southern rice farmers also led to the rapid dismantling and utter destruction of the 20-year old collectivization of land use in the north, thus unleashing the boundless productive energy and freeing up the entrepreneurial spirit of the Vietnamese farmers.
This story serves to stress the paramount importance of government policy in rice production. But, let me continue to elaborate on our own work on laying the rock-solid foundation for Miracle Rice production in the early seventies. At that time South Viet Nam was plagued with constant problems of rice supply to rice-deficient areas, with corruption by unscrupulous officials in charge of the control of the movement of rice, and with speculation, hoarding, and black market by profiteering rice merchants. This is inherent with any kind of control of trade reminiscent of the control of alcohol and tobacco in this country years ago.
This sad state of affair wrought havoc in urban life and on the fixed income segment of our society like soldiers and civil servants, causing undue problems and serious distraction to our central government. The daily difficulty they experienced brought about mounting disaffection among the urban population, the foundation of our regime.
This was why there were concerted efforts by the MTI in 1973 on order from the highest level of our government to implement a new rice marketing policy based on free trade and private sector involvement in all aspects of the business and to get the government’s tight control and stiff regulation out of this vitally important sector of our economy. This is another story that I will relate in the Rice Marketing Program launched by the MTI that I was personally in charge of in the last part of this narrative.
THE ACCELERATED MIRACLE RICE PRODUCTION PROGRAM (Part IV)
Difficulties
As with any massive undertaking, we encountered all kinds of difficulties, but somehow we managed to overcome most of them thanks to the resourcefulness and the hard work of the South Vietnamese people as well as the determination and dedication of its leaders at every level of government.
This is not to say that we undervalued the beneficial assistance of our allies, mostly our American friends in any way. They played an important role in the success of our program implementation as did our other allies. Let me cite a few examples:
President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines overrode his own country’s law to allow South Viet Nam to have the first six tons of IR-8 high-yield rice from IRRI to jumpstart our Green Revolution. I heard that it took President Johnson’s direct intervention to get President Marcos’ favorable response to our request. The IRRI rice experts and other Filipino agriculturists helped us carry out our rice research and new rice varieties adaptation since they knew a lot more about them than our experts.
The Nationalist Chinese Aid Mission helped us with post-rice-harvest horticulture to supplement farmers’ income and to fully utilize land resources. They introduced a lot of new high-yield fast-growing strains of vegetables and taught us modern horticultural practices. Farmers got extra monetary benefits from this secondary crops farming. The Taiwanese helped start our local commercial vegetable seeds production. This was also very beneficial from the standpoint of consumers’ health.
They were also good at fresh water fish farming, which was a big commercial enterprise for people living along the many tributaries of the Mekong River system. Fish, both fresh water and marine types, were the main source of protein for the South Vietnamese people. So, fish raising and fish catching programs both inland and off shore fishing were greatly emphasized and promoted.
I was once the guide to Chiang Ching Kuo, the son of President Chiang Kai Shek of Taiwan and later himself President of his country, to inspect the vegetable demonstration sites set up by the Taiwan Aid Mission horticulturists in Bien Hoa Province. He told me to put out more efforts into the development of that branch of agriculture because they bring more money to the rice farmers on a smaller land surface and would prevent famine when bad weather wrought havoc in our rice growing. He said that farmers could have things to eat and to sell in these hard times just after a few weeks of growing on a year round basis on small plots of land rather than three to six months of growing rice that must be done at the right season. He was right about this because during the decade when the communists fouled up agricultural production due to their forced collectivization of farming operations that led to the South Vietnamese farmers going back to subsistence farming, it was the vegetables that alleviated the detrimental impact of the rice shortfall. My parents told me that, as everybody else, they turned their lawn into vegetable garden for year round production of stuff to fill their stomachs and to barter for other items of subsistence when the communists stripped them of all their wealth, assets, properties, and means of production in their anti-capitalist drive.
Since agricultural programs were carried out in the countryside sometimes far away from cities and towns, security was always of paramount concern. It was not easy to do any worthwhile work when someone was trying to shoot or kidnap you at every turn. But thanks to the government pacification program that brought about decent security to eighty or ninety per cent of our hamlets and villages, a lot of work could still be done in the day time.
Even though I cultivated fruitful working relationships with the great majority of my American counterparts and advisers in different discipline working at the central level, every so often we had problems with American experts in the field. One story always came to my mind, which involved some intransigent American pest control expert working in the Mekong Delta. He was adamant about killing rice-field rats. His thinking was that rats destroyed an enormous amount of rice paddy every year, rice that could be put to good use feeding people in the cities. He supported his contention with all kinds of studies. And we could not convince him that Vietnamese farmers did trap and catch these well-fed plump big rice-field rats to eat and to sell to city folks on the market just like the Americans hunting rabbits and squirrels for meat. Rats are ugly to look at but are a rich and good source of protein and are extraordinarily tasty. And they constitute an easy source of cash for our rice farmers.
My field people were caught between the unwilling farmers and a well-meaning willing American friend. Because I always told my field people to do their best not to alienate the Americans or else I had to find people who could work with them, they did not know what to do. So, I stepped in. I told my guys to do everything the American taught them to do to train farmers in pest control, but when he was gone, to take the bait home and use it in offices and homes to kill sewage city rats and mice instead. And that’s what they did.
Meanwhile I had to convince the American pest control expert my way. So, I invited him and the American entomologist and our field people to a scrumptious five-course baby rabbit dinner complete with good farmers’ sorghum wine that my Lower House Agriculture Committee Chairman uncle provided for the occasion. We had grilled, stewed, braised, stir-fried, and broiled baby rabbit dishes. I told the cook to be sure to cut up the meat in small pieces before serving. Everybody was ranting and raving about how delicious, succulent, tender, and tasty the dishes were. And trust me they were! When the pest control expert voiced his appreciation that this was the best meal of baby rabbit he had ever eaten in his entire life, I said, “I think so too and I am sure that our farmers would second our opinion. So, do you know why they resisted so vehemently to your attempts to exterminate their baby rabbits?” The entomologist chimed in, “I knew that the bones are too small and too soft for rabbit. I worked in the Philippines for many years and found that their so-called baby rabbits were also very good to eat but not as elaborately cooked as these. And you could not tell farmers over there to get rid of them either. Come to think about it, you turn cheap rice carbohydrate into good source of protein costing two to three times higher on weight by weight basis. You don’t have to do a doggone thing to raise them either. Just trap them at night. You cannot beat that.” The pest control expert managed to emit a soft, “I’ll be d--n!” I had my last words, “If you could get more of these excellent American wire traps that you use to catch rodents for study so effectively and give to farmers to improve their catches you would become so popular that I bet you could run for our General Assembly and get elected hands down!”
Later on, I learned from Mr. Nha that even President Thieu consumed the succulent rice field rat meat and so did everybody who lives and works in the rice fields. It was also my favorite meat. That’s why every time I went to Can Tho my people invariably got me a bag of rat meat to take home just as they did with sand dune iguana meat when I went to Nha Trang. There is not any kind of meat that is as tender, tasty, and flavorful as rice-fed field rat succulent meat.
However, most of my problems in implementing our MLRAD programs did not come from the Americans but from our implacable enemy. They invariably tried their utmost best to derail and defeat our plans. And they usually came up with very clever ways to do that. Here is one good example.
When we were implementing the Miracle Rice Production Program, some American fisheries expert got us a wonderful fish species from the Philippines called the Tilapia fish. They reproduced extremely fast. In fact, they produced so fast that there was not enough food to feed them and so they could not grow big. But that was no obstacles because our farmers can eat them small in many ways: deep-fried, salt-pickled, salt-dried, boiled. All the farmers had to do was to release a few baby fish in the flooded rice-fields in the beginning of the growing season when the field was flooded and by the end of the wet season, they could harvest thousands of them without having to do anything. They just scavenged around in the flooded rice-fields for food themselves: algae, snails, larvae, small fries, insects… Great source of easy, good, and cheap protein, these Tilapia!
So, at night the VC’s would parade an advanced case of leprosy in the villages and have him or her say that the affliction was caused by their eating Tilapia fish. This would stop ignorant and credulous farmers from raising and eating that fish. Words spread like fire throughout the Mekong Delta. Therefore, to counteract this scheme I and a lot of our local officials had to visit villages throughout the Delta and had lunch of fried Tilapia fish with village officials and invited skeptical farmers to join in. I also ordered all our Provincial Services in problem provinces to do likewise. Meanwhile I requested that all lepers be rounded up by local authority and sent to the Bao Loc Leprosy Colony in the highlands for treatment by the catholic nuns there. Wherever I went I hauled with me soybean oil for deep-frying small Tilapia fish. My favorite way to eat Tilapia was to get the oil boiling hot and then drop a bucket of them without time-consuming scaling or cleaning. The 400-degree boiling oil got the fish scales all fluffed up and made the whole small fish crispy like potato chip so you can eat the whole fish, scales, head, bones, guts, and all. After awhile this scare tactic was neutralized. To this day Tilapia fish is still popular in the Delta. To get bigger fish farmers have to raise them in pond or cage and feed them with commercial feeds instead of raise them as scavengers in flooded ricefields.
The above-example showed that to work with skeptical, conservative, and even cynical farmers we had to come up some clever way to convince them. When we wanted to propagate Miracle Rice, the farmers would not believe that this high yield rice could produce two to three times the native varieties of rice or that they could grow to three or sometimes even four crops a year with the short-maturing (ninety days) strains. So we had to get USAID to help us with funding to set up thousands of demonstration plots all over the country especially in the Mekong Delta. We used government experiment stations lands, communal lands, and contractual progressive farmers’ lands (the best). We enlisted the help of religious and local political leaders, and farmers’ organizations to jump on the bandwagon to convince farmers. We made sure to use optimal growing techniques to get the highest yield possible by assigning the young agronomy graduates armed with adequate agri-inputs to monitor closely these demo sites for signs of trouble and for timely intervention to snip problems in the bud. We chose the locations that were the most exposed to passers-by for obvious reason. When the harvest time was close we trucked farmers from afar to see the results for themselves. We had our extension on hands to teach farmers right on the spot. We posted armed village security cadres to guard day and night these plots but we specifically told the guards to get drunk -- which was very easy to do -- and pass out and sleep most of time to let whoever wanted to steal the seeds to do so at will and with impunity, which they always did.
When harvest time came we made it a big fanfare well announced in advance and well publicized in the community. And if the seeds were grown on farmers’ lands we paid with cash at rice seed price and not rice paddy price, which was twice higher than what the farmers could get from selling their paddy to rice traders, for use more in future demonstration plots or for farmers to use as their starting stock for the coming harvest season. The news spread like wildfire and we had no problem getting more participants in our program. Even North Viet Namese farmers used Miracle Rice strains up there -- just one year behind us thanks to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
All this grassroots work required a lot of agricultural technocrats of all levels from engineers to technicians and down to cadres who would work with farmers in the countryside. The intensive training of these technocrats to make them well-versed in the latest riziculture technology was extremely important. SVN at that time had a huge world-class Rice Research and Training Station in the Delta set up for us by the French, then the Americans with the help of IRRI rice scientists and staffed by our best foreign-trained scientists and trainers. We trained our trainers by the thousands there every month who would go back to their provinces and villages to train other people and the farmers at their localities. Being myself an educator, I firmly believe in training our technocrats and cadres in all aspects of agricultural development. To this day, I still think that these training efforts were the main reason of all our spectacular successes of our program’s implementation and their lasting legacy. I have to admit that Vietnamese farmers are very progressive and receptive on matter of modern agricultural technologies.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention the paramount role of the Province Chief or District Chief in the successful implementation of any government program. Of all the Province Chiefs, I had the greatest cooperation with Col Nguyen Van Man, Province Chief of the important An Giang Province over the years ever since I was Director of Cabinet and later Director General of Agriculture of the MLRAD and Administrator General of the National Food Administration (NFA) under the MTI. He happened to have a Hoa Hao background like me and a good friend of my uncle Huynh Van Lau, the Lower House Agriculture Committee Chairman. We were so close that in the US Embassy background report about me just declassified, it was mentioned that he was my uncle. He was not. You just could not achieve much without the strong support and close cooperation of regional, provincial, and local authorities during these chaotic war years. And I was pretty good at cultivating that kind of good working relationship. That’s because I don’t know how many times I read Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends and Influence People.”
I spent most of my time in the predominantly Hoa Hao and catholic provinces for three reasons:
1) These people were strongly anti-communist and, thus, these areas were very safe day and night to work in;
2) I could easily influence these farmers just by working with their religious or political leaders, therefore, it was a great time-saver and a strong effort-multiplier because farmers did listen to their religious leaders;
3) I’d like to build my political base just in case someone else became President of South Viet Nam and I lost my government job, thus I could go back home and run for our General Assembly as deputy or senator. As a result, the top two rice producers of all time in all Viet Nam to this day are still An-Giang (which is main Hoa-Hao country) with 3.5 million metric tons and Kien-Giang (where President Ngo Dinh Diem settled most of the Northen Vietnamese Roman catholic farmers) with 3.4 million metric tons according to 2008 statistics.
Results
So, did all these efforts pay off? I would have to say that the results were spectacular even though I am a modest and simple man with simple taste who enjoyed rat and iguana meat. Let’s look at some figures to find the answer to this question in concrete terms. Statistics of Miracle Rice planting acreage, total rice planting acreage, total rice paddy production showed remarkable achievements in the following chart:
CHART SHOWING ACREAGE OF MIRACLE RICE, ACREAGE OF TOTAL RICE, AND TOTAL PADDY PRODUCTION:
These figures showed clearly that South Viet Nam was theoretically self-sufficient in rice by the 1971-1972 harvest season when 1,700,000 acres (not counting farmers who planted Miracle Rice on their own outside the government-sponsored program) of high-yield rice varieties were planted out of 6,250,000 acres of total rice lands, producing a projected total 6,324,000 metric tons of rice paddy well over the estimated 6,100,000 metric tons required to feed the entire population at the time.
Proofs of Rice Self-Sufficiency
As far as our government was concerned, South Viet Nam had achieved self-sufficiency in rice in 1975 for sure when 7,150,000 metric tons of paddy was produced in the 1974-1975 harvest, excluding the high-yield rice produced outside the DGA-sponsored program, which was substantial. If a small amount of American rice was still imported in 1973, it was just a quick-fix attempt to quell the chaotic situation in the rice market and the ensuing panic among the urban population. It was also a ploy by our government to secure American aid waiting for the result of the real fix of the situation – the promulgation of the new Rice Trade Policy of the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) in 1974 under the leadership of the new Minister Nguyen Duc Cuong. American officials and politicians as always were very empathetic with people on the verge of starvation due to their compassionate nature. So, our government (MTI) was prone to take advantage of that largesse for our quick fix of food supply problems real or perceived in those difficult days.
By late 1974, the National Food Administration, an autonomous agency under the MTI that I headed since late 1973, had a strategic stockpile of some 300,000 metric tons in MR I, MR II, and MR III by early 1974 with more coming in the pipeline on a daily basis from the Mekong Delta despite heavy fighting and emergency shipments for refugees. The numbers said it all: in 1974 the NFA shipped only 2,000 metric tons to perennially-rice-deficient Central Viet Nam as compared to 40,000 metric tons in 1973, showing that even the chronically rice-deficient Central area was practically rice-sufficient by 1974.
Another proof that rice was not in short supply was that some provinces in traditionally rice-deficient Central South Viet Nam like Ninh Thuan and Phu Yen did not need Southern rice for the first time in a decade. It was only in MR I provinces where a lot of heavy fighting was going on constantly, resulting in abandonment of rice growing and a sharp increase of refugees, that some government’s stockpiled rice in Da Nang government warehouses was needed on a regular basis to satisfy the need of the urban population.
One more significant proof that attested to the fact that the rice situation was not critical was that no future provision of rice import was contemplated. In other words, 1973 marked the last time that we imported rice from the USA. In fact, the emergency shipment of 30,000 MT of American rice diverted to South Viet Nam from other South East Asian countries in early 1974 to stabilize the rice market was hardly used and ended up being stockpiled for strategic reserve. Only native rice was used because imported rice lost its appeal due to the new non-subsidized price set at world price under Minister Nguyen Duc Cuong’s new Rice Trade Policy, put in effect during the first days of 1974.
But the most solid proof would be the fact that the rice market was stabilized for the first time in a decade. No one was talking in the General Assembly, writing in the local newspapers, complaining in the street, worrying at homes, arguing in the countryside, discussing in the government circle about rice price or rice availability anymore. The war was raging in 1975, but there was no food crisis. In fact, our government rice stockpile was more than adequate, since it ended feeding the whole hungry invading army and the multitude of undernourished carpet baggers from the North for a whole year after they took over the South. My former employees at NFA told me that they even hauled some of that rice up North to feed the chronically underfed leaders of the proletariat. This wonderful situation lasted about a year or so until the communist regime mucked it up with their rude and crude collectivization scheme of rice farming in the Delta that led to the farmers going back predictably to subsistence farming and the decade-long near starvation in the towns and cities of the South.
Conclusion
As you can see, just like the Directorate General of Land Affairs with the Land To The Tiller Program implementation before, the Directorate General of Agriculture performed a superb job in the Accelerated Miracle Rice Production Program and other programs of lesser scale. I put in place a well-oiled and efficient machine that could take any program of any magnitude and bring it to completion provided that adequate supervision and inspection were provided. And I am talking about just one of two dozen or so programs that the DGA implemented at that time in all the sectors of our agriculture.
The rural social revolution that President Nguyen Van Thieu visualized began to take roots in a big positive way. His agriculture-based economic development of his nation that he ordered was on an overdrive trajectory with great promise for the future as judging from the success of the most important program of that plan—the Accelerated Miracle Rice Production Program. His vision of a predominantly rural middle class for South Viet Nam began to materialize at a rapid rate. The main players that he entrusted with the execution of his hopes and dreams for his people seemed to have a firm grip on the plan of action to carry them out to a successful conclusion.
Epilogue
After a couple of years I knew exactly what, when, where, how, and why to do this kind of work. I felt as snug as a bug in the rug as the DGA Chief. I was happy in my elements. I led by examples from the front quite successfully. My people worked hard because they admired me and not because they feared me. I never asked them to do anything that I could not do it myself. For example, when the government armed civil servants to protect their facilities round the clock after the communist failed Tet Mau Than Offensive, I pulled the same armed guard duty at night as any peons in my organization when it was my turn. No other high level officials in our government of my status did that. Bureaucrats at that time were not paid enough to be led by orders. They put forth a great effort only if they admired their leadership or if they really wanted to contribute their fair share to our overall struggle against an implacable enemy or if they truly believed in the righteousness of our common cause. I was pretty good at making people who served under me feel like that because the Vietnamese people are deep down a very patriotic people and the nationalist cadres were basically a devoted bunch.
I began to work on exciting spin-off programs when President Thieu put a screeching halt to that by unexpectedly appointing me, in yet another reshuffle of his administration, Vice-Minister of Agriculture, which was a cabinet rank. This was just a prelude to something else even more important that I was called upon to carry out. You can say that it was the culmination of an interesting and successful career in public service in a nation ravaged by an endless and implacable war of aggression. The fact that we achieved the successes we did spoke volume of the resiliency, the resourcefulness, the determination, and the dedication of the South Vietnamese agricultural cadres and officials. I was so proud and so grateful to have the opportunity of a lifetime to lead these people in that important task for a good part of my productive life.
It was my curious fate that every time I was unexpectedly handed a new job to carry out, the degree of difficulty seemed to increase exponentially because the work to be done was farther and farther out of my area of specialty and comfort zone and the problem was more and more urgent and challenging. This coming job was the third of such time.
(Zorro gửi tặng. ttngbt cảm ơn vì đã được phép đăng loạt bài giá trị này)
