BUILDING AN OWNERSHIP SOCIETY FOR A RURAL SOCIAL REVOLUTION

By Dr. Trần Quang Minh

Kentucky Colonel Medal
Nguyên Tổng Giám Đốc Tổng Nha Nông Nghiệp
Nguyên Thứ Trưởng Bộ Nông Nghiệp
Nguyên Thứ Trưởng Bộ Thương Mại và Công Kỹ Nghệ Kiêm Tổng Cục Trưởng Tổng Cục Thực Phẩm QUốc Gia


Epilogue
My service was abruptly interrupted in 1969 when I was drafted in the general mobilization following the Tet Offensive and sent to a special boot camp at Quang Trung Training Center with a lot of high officials in the government including young ministers of draft age. Since every official high and low was affected by the general mobilization decree, it was understood that, at the end of the nine weeks of basic training, the government entity, where one worked, had to write the MoD to request a transfer back home. Mr. Nguyen Duc Cuong, the future MTI Minister and Dr. Nguyen Thanh Hai, the future NAI Rector who were in my Nguyen Hue Battalion were sent home on time. I worked for two ministries—the MoA and the MoEd—doing very important civilian jobs, but neither one made the request to the MoD to get me out of the military. So while everybody went home upon completion of boot camp training, I was still kept there with the group who would be sent to the Thu Duc Reserved Officer Training School, since I had a college education, to be trained for officer duty in the armed forces. Years ago I learned that if your place of work did not like you, it would not request your transfer back either from boot camp or from officer training school. I figured that if nobody wanted me to carry on my important civilian duty then I will choose a military career because I dearly loved my country and I truly believed in our anti-communist cause. In fact, I always thought that I would made a good military leader because of my fearlessness and aggressivity. But, my wife thought otherwise: when she did not see me back as planned, she worried and called her friend who was Mr. Hoang Duc Nha’s wife. Nha at that time was President Thieu’s Special Assistant must have called someone because the next day I was honorably discharged from the Army to go back to my civilian job. 
In a way military service was good for me because it taught me discipline, resiliency, hard work, gumption, and teamwork. These were things I found very valuable in the discharge of my official duties and at the origin of my successes as a leader of men tackling difficult jobs.

Part 1 of 4
BUILDING AN OWNERSHIP SOCIETY FOR A RURAL SOCIAL REVOLUTION
THE ‘LAND TO THE TILLER PROGRAM’


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

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)

IRRI: International Reseach of Rice Institute, cha đẻ các giống lúa thần Nông than ngắn, lá thẳng mà bắt đấu là IR8

Introduction
Shortly after I got back from boot camp after nine weeks of basic military training, I resumed my previous work, which was teaching at the Superior School of Agronomy Forestry and Animal Science (SSAFAS). Even though I had other faculty members substituting for me to teach my three courses during my absence, they were just doing stop-gap jobs. I had to a do a crash make-up session involving extra time at night and during week-end that my poor students had to endure. Students really had to like, respect, and admire me to put up with all these hardships. There was no shortage of harassment that my poor students had to endure. And over the years, when I enlisted them in all my programs I amply returned all their kindness and gave them all due consideration and recognition.
The Accelerated Protein Production Program (APPP) was still on the fast tract of progress during my absence thanks to my able second in command at the Tan Son Nhut Livestock Experiment Station (TSNLES): Mrs. Nguyen Thi Quoi. I taught her how to get along and work with my American counterpart and advisers and she did just that and more. Women seemed to be able to work with Americans a lot better than men in my experience, but, unfortunately there were not too many women in position of authority in our society. I was lucky that the 3 chiefs of sections under me were all very able female technocrats.
The nice thing about working with the private sector in programs such as the APPP was that the participants joined the effort for their own benefit and profit unlike working with public servants who viewed everything as an eight-to-six job. I had a few American retired private sector experts in the livestock industry that USAID contracted to help our private sector entrepreneurs. They worked wonders with our people to the point that when one particularly good poultry expert had to go home after his contract expired, my father came to see me to ask if I could intervene with USAID to extend his contract because the people in his poultry association wanted the American around longer to pick his brain. I said, “Dad, I could not do that. I could not possibly tell the Americans how to run their doggone business. It’s not done before.” He protested, “What do you mean you could not do that? You ran the APPP for two years. You must carry some weight with USAID.” I just sheepishly answered, “You asked me to do something nobody has ever done before. I am not comfortable doing that.” 
So, he asked my Uncle Huynh Van Lau who was the Chairman of our Lower House Agriculture Committee to join him and both of them went to see the Director of USAID/Saigon to request an extension of the poultry expert’s contract. I didn’t know how they did that because neither of them spoke English. But you know what? They got USAID to extend the contract. I ran into JB Davis who was the Associate Director of USAID for Agriculture and our Minister’s counterpart shortly afterwards. He told me, “Dr. Minh, do you know that in all the years I have been working for USAID all over the world in the past thirty five years, your father and your uncle were the only ones who would and could tell USAID how to run its business. They said you would not want to tell us how to run our doggone business. Good for them!” All I could do was to murmur a weak, “I’ll be damned!” 
In retrospect, I think that these American and South Viet Namese private sector entrepreneurs were instrumental in getting our livestock industry burn all these long intermediate steps between start-up and take-off and blossom. The poultry and swine livestock industry reached commercial level in a few short years—three to four years at most. After that the government role was minimal. Once that was taking root, the Directorate of Livestock Production and Protection’s main job was to assist the small farmers, the people who raised fewer than a 100 broilers or layers and a couple of pigs in their backyard to supplement their fixed income. We had a lot of those. 
I remember growing up my mother every year grew a pig in the beginning of the year inside our house, believe me or not. At the end of the year she sold it to a meat market and had enough money to get all her seven kids new clothes, new shoes, and pocket money (li xi) for the Tet (Lunar New Year) celebration. Most other South Viet Namese did that. The pig ate kitchen refuge from cooking preparation and left-over from meals. My mom even taught the pig how to use our Turkish toilet. 
The last pig she raised was so smart that she did not have the heart to sell it and by that time my dad was pretty wealthy from his poultry business that my mom did not need her live “piggy bank” any more. That pig grew up to be like a 300-lb monster and we kids used to ride her all over the neighborhood. I even made my pocket money by charging neighbor kids one piaster per ride around the block. The pig was so scared of my dad that when she heard his car she would dash from the front door to the kitchen to seek my mom’s protection, knocking people, mopeds, bikes, chairs, and tables along the way, oinking oinking oinking loudly from beginning to the end. I related this story to emphasize the beneficial unintended consequence of the APPP: the creation of a livestock cottage industry among fixed income urban people besides the livestock industry. This activity really softened the inflationary pressure on them and their families and contributed to the wildly successful APPP in suburban setting. 
This must have caused some repercussion at the highest level of our ministry because, one day in 1969, Mr. Nguyen-Thanh-Qui, the Assistant Minister to the newly appointed energetic thirty-five-year-old Minister of Land Reform and Agriculture Development (MLFAD), Cao Van Than, whom President Thieu appointed to carry out his social revolution, more specifically the Land To The Tiller land reform program, called me to his office to convey the Minister’s intention by telling me, “The Minister wishes to form a dynamic team to help him implement the Land To The Tiller land reform program. He wants you to be his Director of Cabinet (similar to Chief of Staff in this country). So are you interested?” To that I said, “I want to thank the Minister for his consideration. I will accept his offer if he allows me to continue my teaching job at the SSAFAS as the previous Minister did because I don’t want to lose my root. I was on loan here from the Ministry of Education. I teach only two hours of surgery a week now because we have two American-trained PhD faculty members just join us who will teach my other two courses.” 
Minister Than obviously knew what he was doing because he bypassed at least four levels of bureaucracy to promote me from the eighth position to the third position in the ministry hierarchy, something rarely if not ever done in our country. That certainly did not sit well with nor endear him to the hierarchy of the ministry, to say the least. My Mom must be right because this promotion was pivotal in my career rise. It was a high and solid stepping stone.
I always consider the shaping up of the agricultural technocrats of South Viet Nam as extremely important for the building of our rural society. I always view the college years as crucial time in the development of young people because many of the attitudes and ideas they form while in college would be the compasses that guide them for the rest of their lives. After seeing that the clueless college students wrought havoc in the US foreign policy I did not want South Viet Nam to have similar problems in the middle of its life-and-death struggle to remain free. We sorely needed a lot of good dedicated smart technocrats to build our agriculture-based economy as President Park Chung Hee admonished. We were lucky to have a dozen classes of these young but devoted agriculturists who performed not only superbly, but sometime above and beyond the call of duty. 
Minister Cao Van Than had no problem with my request. And so, at twenty nine I was the youngest Dong Ly Van Phong (Directeur de Cabinet = Director of the Cabinet) of a major ministry South Viet Nam ever had. It was getting to be a routine from this time onwards: I was invariably the youngest official to ever hold each and every position of leadership of great importance in the hierarchy of our government spanning three ministries, happy circumstances that bolstered my mother’s contention that I was born under very good stars. This position was a French creation similar to but not quite the same as the job of Chief of Staff in the American officialdom. The position ranks third in power right below the Minister and the Vice-Minister (if there exists one) or the Assistant Minister (if there is one). In our government set up, the Vice Minister post is a cabinet rank appointed by the President whereas the Assistant Minister is not and is named by the Minister himself to assist him in his heavy duty.
The job of the Director of Cabinet, which is a staff function and not a line function is mainly to: 
1. Handle the Minister’s political and public relation dealings that he himself does not want to do for any reason; 
2. Represent the ministry in negotiating with foreign countries concerning foreign aids at the ministry level; 
3. Represent the ministry in inter-ministerial work at that level; 
4. Attend all the regional meetings with the General Commander in Chief of different MR’s when the Minister could not go; 
5. Carry out any special mission that the Minister assigns; 
6. Give the Minister his personal opinion on matter of importance concerning the Ministry’s operations and management to help him make his decision.
In that position, as examples, I was called upon to: 
1. Handle all these members of our General Assembly or their representatives or city and province councilmen or trade associations or farmers organizations who came to us for favors, complaints, grievances on their constituents’ or members’ behalf or on their own behest; 
2. Negotiate assistance from South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines for our agricultural development programs. That was why I travelled overseas quite a lot and attended banquets all the time on the Minister’s behalf. I also participated in many yearly international meetings like FAO, SEATO/SEAMES, etc. as a representative of our country or of my ministry; 
3. Participate in all the coordination and cooperation meetings of the ministries concerned for resolving certain problems that required high inter-ministerial authorities: monthly HES pacification meeting, refugee resettlements, foreign exchange allocation, military deferment, etc.; 
4. Go to the regional meetings with the MR Commander and his Province Chiefs to unravel problems stemming from the implementation of a myriad of programs of our ministry at the grassroots level. 
The MLRAD had more programs going on everywhere than any other ministry because sixty five % of our people lived off agricultural activities and every month I had to go to these long meetings, most of the time in MR IV where most of our programs were concentrated. Sometimes, even President Thieu or the Prime Minister himself went down to Can Tho with the ministers concerned and met with the people in charge of important programs like the land reform and pacification programs. In time of war, there was nothing like the full power of the presidency to light fire under the butt of military authorities at regional and local levels to get them to assist in the implementation of civilian programs. I liked to give to our Minister especially difficult problems beyond our control that I detected during my many inspections in the boonies for him to give to the President to raise at these meetings. It showed the local authorities that the highest level of government was aware of local bottlenecks and hang-ups. President Thieu always said that he would visit the locality again to see how the problem was resolved; it would be solved in a hurry; 
5. Spend a lot of time in the provinces on routine inspection of program implementation. The MLRAD had more provincial services than any other ministry. South Viet Nam had forty four provinces up and down the country, sixteen of them were in MRIV where 11,000,000 South Viet Namese lived at the time, 6,000,000 of those were farmers. The MLRAD had two Directorates General (Tong Nha), the Directorate General of Land Affairs (DGLA) that implemented the land reform program and the Directorate General of Agriculture (DGA) that carried out at any time some two dozens of major agricultural development programs in the government’s Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan and many smaller projects in the nine sectors of agriculture. The DGLA had its thirty five Provincial Land Affairs Service (PLAS = Ty Dien Dia) in most provinces and none in highland provinces where there was not any rice-land to justify the cost of setting up a service there. On the other hand, the DGA had nine Directorates covering nine sectors of agriculture and most of them had provincial services or regional offices, which created an extensive and complex local organization in the far-flung provinces.
In anticipation of the coming passage of the Land To The Tiller Law being heatedly debated in our General Assembly, Minister Cao Van Than was spending almost half a year ramping up the massive organization and the intensive training that would be needed to carry out that revolutionary program. I said massive and intensive because eventually it would involve some 50,000 central and local, intra- and inter-ministerial people, mostly in the far-flung 2,100 villages, i.e., more people involved in any single government civilian program in the history of our country. USAID-Saigon in the beginning had only one land reform expert. Eventually to keep up with us it had 35 of them in its land reform division alone, in all likelihood the biggest group of all.
I was lucky to be involved at a close up position in the planning and execution of the biggest and most complex government program our country ever undertook and to see its eventual successful completion in record time by a 35-year-old, dynamic, and effective minister who cumulated two massive portfolios at the same time: the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Rural Reconstruction. No wonder, he was trained at the university best known for development administration: Pittsburgh University School of Administration and International Relation. This experience was of extreme value for me in my next two big responsibilities I was called upon to discharge. There was nothing more importance than on-the-job training for leadership of big program planning and implementation.
With that preliminary introduction let me next talk about the most important and most meaningful achievement of the Second Republic of Viet Nam bar none: land reform. At the outset, I want to state that this was no ordinary land distribution, but truly it was a rural social revolution. Unlike most revolutions, ours was a very peaceful and equitable one as you will find out later. Under the leadership of President Nguyen Van Thieu, we launched this rural social revolution by building almost overnight an ownership society. I was lucky to have an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in the implementation of that historical undertaking. So, allow me the privilege to share with you that unique experience which was so close to my heart. 
Basically, I will be sharing with you how the government of the Second Republic of Viet Nam was building an ownership society under the gunpoint of an implacable enemy who was bent on derailing it at every turn. It was not just any kind of ownership society, but an ownership society of the free-private-entrepreneurial type. And this undertaking was not for the enjoyment of any privileged class of our citizenry that exerted great influence or wielded strong power, but for the benefit of the underprivileged and long-suffering mass of our people. President Thieu wanted to create, in other words, almost overnight a rural middle class, made up of the majority of our people.
To realize that rural revolution, the Second Republic of Viet Nam launched several programs on direct orders from President Thieu—a massive land reform program and an ambitious Five-Year Agricultural Development Plan. I said massive because it was the biggest land redistribution program in Viet Nam and, for that matter, in Asia. And I said ambitious because it was the agricultural development program that brought about food self-sufficiency to a war-torn economy in record time. I will concentrate here on the most important program which was also the most successful of that endeavor—the Land-To-The-Tiller Program (LTTTP).

BUILDING AN OWNERSHIP SOCIETY FOR A RURAL SOCIAL REVOLUTION (II) 

Background

First, it is worthwhile to go over some background information on land tenure throughout the ages in South Viet Nam to understand the rationale behind this vast undertaking. Land tenure management in Viet Nam went through many changes since time immemorial. Here are some important ones.

Dynastic Land Reforms:

Throughout most of our 2000 years of history the Viet Namese people had lived under different royal and imperial dynasties. During these feudal times, under the self- proclaimed mandate from heaven, emperors and kings literally owned all the country’s lands, which they doled out to mandarins, generals, and veterans as rewards for their past meritorious service and their unwavering allegiance to the empires or kingdoms. These rulers also accorded lands to newly created villages as source of their revenues to run their local government—these lands were known as communal lands (cong dien).
There was one noticeable land development scheme that resulted in the reclamation of large marginal swamp lands performed by Nguyen Cong Tru, a famous mandarin of the Nguyen Dynasty under Emperor Tu Duc. This project opened up new lands for the resettlement of a lot of landless people and for the creation of new villages. But we did not have too many of these undertakings in ancient times. The adventurous people themselves had to band themselves up and blaze trails in their southward migration to build new lives and new fortunes for themselves, most of the time at heavy cost of lives and limbs, in the last six centuries, much like the American pioneers in their westward movement.
All through successive dynasties, little ever changed except for minor tinkering in the creation of feudal societies where the lot of the peasants did not improve much through the ages. 
Land Management under the French Domination:
Then, beginning in the 1860’s and in the early Twentieth Century under the French domination, the French colonialists allowed their citizens and the Viet Namese who served them in their administration, and thus deserved to acquire French citizenship, to exploit virgin lands for cultivation of both industrial plants (hemp, jute, sugar cane, tea, coffee, and rubber trees) and rice or secondary crops (beans, peanut). The colonial administration also used public funds to finance vast land reclamation schemes and private citizens who disposed of means could buy these lands at auctions upon completion of the project. Of course, these auctions were out of the reach of common poor people.
Consequently, newly cleared lands were usually bought exclusively by the rich, famous, influential, and powerful people in our society. South Viet Nam had roughly 15,000,000 acres (6,000,000 ha) of cultivable lands. Half of that total or 7,500,000 acres (3,000,000 ha) was under cultivation and was owned by some 50,000 landowners of all sizes. Some 6,000 largest landowners possessed nearly 3,000,000 acres (1,200,000 ha) or 40% of the cultivated land. In the Mekong Delta alone, 430 French citizens owned 625,000 acres (250,000 ha) or more 8% of the total land under cultivation. 
I need to open some big parentheses here to give the readers some insight as to why land reform was not successful during the First Republic and the Interregnum Period. I knew three of these French citizens mentioned above very well. They were brothers and were my great uncles Gaston Do Van Diem (Great Uncle Eighth) and Charles Do Van Kia Great Uncle Tenth), two former District Chiefs of many provinces in the Mekong Delta during the colonial time and the middle brother Do Van Son, my mom’s father, was also a former District Chief like his siblings. [Actually my Mom was born out of wedlock when her landlord father had an illicit affair with a beautiful daughter of one of his tenant farmers because his legal wife was sterile]. These three brothers rose to the top administrative rank of Doc Phu Su Dac Hang (Doc Phu Su Exceptional Class) in the late 30’s and early 40’s and were awarded the prestigious French Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) the highest civilian medal for their forty years of meritorious services for the colonial authorities. I was told that they were honored for having cleared hundreds of thousands of acres of rice land and dug hundreds of kilometers of canals and built thousands of kilometers of rural roads in their many Mekong Delta districts over these four decades of colonial service to be thus recognized. Naturally they themselves also owned thousands of acres of rice land each here and there in the Delta wherever they used to hold office. The Do’s clan was very big. It came from a Do ancestor who was a notable in the French colonial village administration in Chau Doc. He was the Chief of the Council of Notables (Hoi Dong Xa) of a village. He had nine children. 
At the time my Mom sent me to Saigon for my high schooling I stayed the first six years in a house on 14 Nguyen Thanh Y Street in Dakao District of Saigon with Great Uncle Gaston Diem, the titular head of the clan because he was the oldest surviving son of the bunch. That clan had numerous descendants who were village administrators of various capacities throughout the Mekong Delta, especially in Chau Doc, An Giang, Dinh Tuong, Long An, Bac Lieu Provinces. It even had men who fought in France’s army against Hitler. It also sent a member to Paris as deputy from Cochinchina in the French General Assembly. Quite a few people in the clan married French men and women. It counted no less than three colonels [one, Colonel Hoang Van Ty who married my seventh aunt, was General Thieu’s second in command at the Dalat Military Academy] in the Republic of Viet Nam Army and Air Force assimilated from the French Armed Forces. It also had numerous lesser ranking officers in the RVNAF except Uncle Quang, the tenth son of my Great Uncle Do Van Diem. Nobody knew what got into him, but he joined the Viet Minh to fight the French. Of course, the communists did not trust people of his class, so he was only a medic in their forces. He came home quite disillusioned after Dien Bien Phu.
Every year the clan’s members gathered for ancestors’ worshipping a couple times at my great uncle’s house true to our Viet Namese tradition. All I heard vehemently discussed there by at least a couple hundred relatives was how to use all the loopholes there were in the land reform laws to keep the land in each descendant family. Uncle Four Nguyen Van Trinh, the Director General of Land Affairs (DGLA) and his son-in-law Dang who was the Provincial Land Affairs Service (PLAS) Chief in Go Cong Province held court in telling everybody what to do to fight expropriation, circumvent the regulations, and evade the laws or request for expropriation and compensation for land abandoned in remote areas or taken over by the VC’s. They were mostly absentee landlords at that time, living in France or in Saigon.
The powerful Do Clan was dead set against land reform because they thought it was unfair, illegal, and smacked of communist highhandedness and class warfare. When the French gave South Viet Nam independence after the Dien Bien Phu debacle they bought back all the rice lands owned by the French citizens to give to the government of Viet Nam, under Emperor Bao Dai as Chief of State with Ngo Dinh Diem as Prime Minister, supposedly to be distributed to landless farmers. 
But somehow all my distant uncles and their descendants still had rice lands from the clan’s big holdings. I remember when my parents moved to Saigon in the late 50s they bought a unit of my great uncle Do Van Kia’s new three-story sixty-unit condo that he got from the French at the foot of the Hien Vuong Bridge in exchange for giving up a part of his land holdings. From my great uncle Do Van Diem came three interesting individuals who played some important roles in our regime’s history: 1) His son-in-law, Le Tan Nam who married his oldest daughter, held a few ministerial portfolios (mostly Ministry of Justice = Bo Tu Phap) early in Nguyen Van Tam’s, Tran Van Huu’s, and Ngo Dinh Diem’s administrations. He was the first Viet Namese to receive the French Licence-en-Droit (JD) and was Tan An District Chief and Saigon Mayor for many years; 2) Le Tan Nam’s son—Le Tan Loc was the perpetual Director General of Viet Nam Thuong Tin (Viet Nam Credit Bank), the big government bank; 3) Another son-in-law who married his third daughter, my uncle Nguyen Van Trinh, the DGLA who was in charge of implementing the Diem’s and the Interregnum Period’s agrarian reform programs. Obviously, it was a poor choice to pick a member of a big land-holding family who didn’t believe in agrarian reform to do land redistribution. Besides, a mandarin like President Diem would not be someone who would have a burning desire to redress social justice through meaningful, drastic, and revolutionary land reform. So, not much enthusiastic work had been done for more than a decade of land reform schemes, not to mention a lot of evasions of the law perpetrated by landowners through insider information. 
That was why when Minister Cao Van Than was entrusted by President Thieu to implement his landmark Land To The Tiller Land Reform Program, a new landless young Northerner Director General of Land Affairs named Bui Huu Tien was put in charge of the DGLA and a brand new team of young and dynamic technocrats was put in place to carry out vigorously the hard and pressing work. 
That did not mean that the Do Clan was not patriotic: it had two officers posthumously awarded the highest medal of valor of SVN, the Bao Quoc Quan Chuong, akin to the American Medal of Honor. My DGLA Chief uncle Nguyen Van Trinh’s oldest son who was my cousin and fellow J.J. Rousseau high school mate, Lt. J.G. Jean Nguyen Van Tri was the South Viet Namese second in command of one of our Navy ships that was sunk by the stronger Chinese communist naval forces during the naval engagement for the defense of the Paracels Islands on order from President Thieu. 
He was mortally wounded by enemy’s rocket fire, rescued by his fellow combatants on a raft that was drifting in the South China Sea for almost a week before they were rescued by a foreign merchant ship. When his blood was attracting sharks that endangered his men and knowing that he would not survive, Tri ordered his men to toss him overboard to end his suffering. They refused to obey his order. They eventually had to do that after he died to get rid of the trailing sharks. Tri was one of the two South Viet Namese naval officers who were honored as national heroes by both our regime and the current communist regime for being killed in combat fighting the Chicoms. The other officer was another one of our ship commanders who was killed in the same battle. This was the famous battle discussed at the Cornell Symposium by Rear Admiral Nguyen Van Ky Thoai, Commander of that fateful MR I Naval Forces.
I relate this family story just to give you an insight on one of the reasons why President Diem’s land reform failed and to give a probable explanation as why only in Long An, An Giang, and Chau Doc Provinces, where most of the people of that clan exerted strong influence in the local government, almost half of all the grievances stemming from the Land To The Tiller Program (LTTTP) implementation originated. You can multiply this situation by at least 300 since there were that many similar clans in South Viet Nam to understand the magnitude of the obstacles President Thieu and Minister Than must have overcome to carry the Second Republic’s social revolution to satisfactory completion.
The French colonial administration unintentionally aggravated the land tenure problems by vastly increasing land holdings in the hands of a few powerful people, usually French citizens or Viet Namese having French citizenship by serving in their colonial administration or the village notables who governed the colony at the grassroots level. The French colonialists in power at the time did indeed open up vast areas of lands in their colony in the South through forest land clearings for industrial plantations and through swamp land reclamations in the Mekong Delta for rice farming. But these efforts did not benefit many landless farmers because the local authorities at different levels managed to amass through collusion, deception, ruse, trick, fraud the bulk of these lands for themselves. 
Agrarian Reform Under the First Republic of Viet Nam:
Real agrarian reform was first approached under the First Republic of Viet Nam from 1955 to 1963. But that weak first attempt was an unworkable program following the promulgation of Ordinance 57 in October 1956, that achieved poor results. During these eight years, little was accomplished as expected, for one reason or another. A few plausible reasons were discussed above. 
Before the events of Ordinance 57, there were two attempts by President Ngo Dinh Diem to control the excesses of the land tenancy system in South Viet Nam by controlling rents and by giving a greater degree of land tenure to tenant farmers. Ordinance 2, promulgated on January 28, 1955, mandated that land rent be between 15-25% of the average harvest and be formalized with a three-year written contract to reduce evictions. Ordinance 7, promulgated on February 5, 1955, was designed to protect the rights of tenants on new and abandoned lands to encourage cultivation (squatters’ rights protection). These ordinances also reduced rent payments after crop failure and gave renters first right of refusal should the owners decide to sell their holdings.
Now let’s take a closer look at land reform under the First Republic of Viet Nam, the first weak attempt at real reform of land tenure. Unfortunately this was not done the right way! Otherwise, we probably would not have to fight the Viet Nam War as Roy Prosterman and Chester Bowles said. That lost decade between 1954 to 1964 and the following Interregnum Period between 1964 to 1967 could have been used effectively to launch a rural social revolution similar to the one President Nguyen Van Thieu implemented sixteen years later complete with a vigorous agriculture-based economic development program. The ensuing transformation of the South Viet Namese society would be such that it could have very well pre-emptd any NVN’ s attempt to subvert SVN free government and its stronger economy. It was a terrible missed opportunity that led to horrific consequences for tens of millions of South Vietnamese!
In a nutshell, the legal basis of the First Republic of Viet Nam land reform program was covered by Ordinance 57 signed by President Ngo Dinh Diem in October of 1957. It put a 250-acre (100 ha) limit on rice land ownership and gave the landlords the right to keep another 37.5 acres (fifteen ha) for ancestral worship. Any excess land would be expropriated and owners would be compensated. Expropriated land would then be sold to farmers in installments. Landowners received ten per cent of land price in cash and ninety per cent in government bonds redeemable in twelve years. The huge 250-acre cap left only 1,130,000 acres (452,000 ha), which made up only twenty % of SVN domestically owned lands, available for expropriation from some 2,035 landlords. These lands were usually not prime rice lands because the landowners claimed the best lands as their 250 acres (100 ha) retained property for themselves or their relatives or their 37.50 acres (fifteen ha) of ancestral worship land: These expropriated lands were usually not the best rice lands near rivers, canals, and rural roads, but were abandoned lands in remote areas or cultivated lands in communist-controlled areas from which landlords could not collect rent anyway or lands far away from transportation networks. On the other hand, the prime land that each landowner was allowed to keep—287.5 acres—would continue to keep up to eighty tenant farmers in perpetual bondage because the average rented plot of land was 3.5 acres (1.4 ha) in the Delta. 
At that time, the government also disposed of two other chunks of public domain lands that it did a pretty poor job of redistribution to needy and deserving tilling farmers: 1) 662,000 acres (265,000 ha) “squatter claimed” lands; 2) 375,000 acres (150,000 ha) of “land development center” agricultural lands. 
The program had so many loopholes that were easily exploited by devious landlords and sharp lawyers to avoid expropriation. Prosterman and Riedinger gave an excellent study of these problems in their “Land Reform and Democratic Development” book for anyone interested in a deeper understanding of this program. 
As Roy Prostetrman et al reported, “…The cumulative result of all the program as of the end of 1967 was the distribution of some 275,000 hectares (687,000 acres) of land to 130,000 families. This represented less than 1/8 of SVN cultivated land, with benefits going to barely 1/10 of those who had been wholly or substantially dependent on farming land as tenants.”
Now, just what exactly was accomplished during those seven years under the Diem Administration? 
Because of the adoption of complex and centralized bureaucratic procedures for the distribution processes, from 1957 to 1963, only fifty per cent of expropriated lands were redistributed or roughly 560,000 acres (226,000 ha). Understandably, poor farmers had little money to buy necessities of life much less to buy lands. So, only roughly 100,000 out of approximately 1,000,000 existing tenant farmers (almost all in the Mekong Delta) benefitted from the program. (The 900,000 difference will be discussed below). The 625,000 acres (250,000 ha) of French citizens’ lands was barely touched because only fewer than 12,500 acres (5,000 ha) were distributed to 2,900 families, mainly in Ninh Thuan and Binh Thuan Provinces. The difference between the results achieved at the end of 1967 and 1963 was the result in land distribution achieved during the Interregnum Period: 687,000 – 560,000 = 127,000 acres (275,000 – 226,000 = 49,000 ha) given to 130,000 – 100,000 = 30,000 families. This period was a period of chaotic government due to military coup after military coup and a time of increasing insurgency war fomented and perpetrated by the communist North Vietnamese.
So the political, social, and economic impact of this land reform was minimal and inconsequential. That was why the insurgency war intensified during this time. The battle for the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people could not be won. And President Diem tried other ineffective and costly schemes like agro-villes to change the countryside to no avail. 
Shortly after he became Chief of State, President Thieu realized that to prosecute the war against the communists effectively he had to focus on land reform a lot more than the previous administration. On September 1968, he began to formulate and enunciate his own concept of land reform by giving an accurate assessment of the situation: The government of the RVN was faced with a long standing problem of social injustice which demanded solution if the pacification was to be effective. The practice of tenant farming, which in effect, made the tenant farmer slave to the land and to a continuous cycle of poverty, had to be abolished. This was a monumental historical decision of epic proportion by a leader of Viet Nam.
President Thieu hoped to achieve three main goals with the transformational land reform program he contemplated:
1. Provide social justice for the long suffering Viet Namese peasants
2. Undercut the Viet Cong land distribution scheme to gain the political support needed to establish government control of the countryside
3. Provide the basis for a sound agricultural economy
That brings me to a detailed discussion of land reform under the Second Republic of Viet Nam that I had first-hand knowledge with when I was the Director of Cabinet—the third highest-ranking official of the ministry--of Minister Cao Van Than, the new dynamic, hard-working, driven, and knowledgeable Minister of Land Reform and Agriculture Development, a close Adviser of President Thieu in agrarian reform and economic development, the architect, and the implementer of the most successful land reform program of all time in recent history. It was the kind of land reform program that the New York Times unabashedly called ”probably the most ambitious and progressive non-Communist land reform of the twentieth century.” From a leftist newspaper, this was an unadulterated compliment.
Land Tenure in South Viet Nam:
Before going into the details of President Thieu’s land reform program, it is a good idea to cover the state of land tenure prevalent at the time when President Thieu proclaimed the Second Republic of Viet Nam in 1967. 
At that time, some 60% of the South Viet Namese population of roughly 17,000,000 were peasants or a little more than 10,000,000. They were mainly rice farmers. And three fifths (3/5) of these farmers or roughly 6,000,000 lived in the Mekong Delta where 80% of rice was produced. The remaining two fifths (2/5) of the farmers or roughly 4,000,000 lived in the narrow coastal plains of the Central Lowlands.
According to available statistics from UN/FAO, in the early 1960s there were 1,175,000 farming households, but only 257,000 (or 22%) farming families owned all their lands in mainly the Mekong Delta. Their average acreage was roughly four acres (1.7 hectares). Another 334,000 families (or 28%) farmed an average of six acres (2.4 ha) of rice land both rented and owned: with 2/3 of total area rented from landlords and 1/3 of the area owned. There were 521,000 farming families (or 44%) who farmed an average of 3.5 acres (1.4 ha) of lands that was totally rented from landlords. Therefore, 72% (44% + [28% x 2/3]) of the Delta farmers relied on both rented and owned substantially or on totally rented lands for their livelihood.
According to the Stanford Research Institute, in the Mekong Delta, landlords supplied virtually no credit, seeds, fertilizer, farm implements but usually collected rents in kind in the form of one third or more of the harvest, which was usually fixed in advance. It did not matter whether the harvest was good or bad. If the harvest was bad due to bad weather or insect or disease damage, the tillers still were responsible for the rent. If they could not pay, interest as high as 60% a year would be applied to what they owed, and lead to as much as three fourths of the harvest collected in the next harvest. 
Landlords of at least more than half of the rented lands were mostly absentees living in France or in cities. At harvest time, landlords or their agents who usually were village notables or military officers would collect the rent due. These agents would have a cut (15-20%) of what they could collect. Therefore, coercive methods were often used, leading to a lot of resentment.
Farmers also suffered from selling their rice crops at a fixed price to local middlemen, usually the Chinese operator of the local grocery store who advanced the farmers the money or the groceries his family needed to live on until harvest time or to hire needed labor, or to acquire agri-inputs. 
In the Central Lowlands, with scarcity of lands, the situation was a lot worse. There, only 190,000 families (or 27%) out of 695,000 owned an average of 1.5 acres (or 0.6 ha) of the land they tilled. The majority or 403,000 farming families (or 58%) tilled two acres (0.8 ha) with half of that land rented from someone else. A minority of 74,000 farmers rented the average of one acre (0.4 ha) of land they farmed. Rents in the area amounted to 50% of the harvest.
With this sad state of affairs in our rural society, one could easily understand why it was easy for the communists to foment insurgency warfare. We could readily deal with an aggression war from the North, but having an internal insurgency war in the countryside where disaffected peasants sheltered and supported the guerillas with food and manpower on top of that would make things so much more difficult to cope with. For this reason, President Thieu realized that he must transform our rural society by changing it into an ownership society to give the poorest and most numerous segment of our population a chance to break out of its grinding cycle of poverty. In other words, he must bring about a rural revolution using land reform and agricultural development to win back the heart and mind of the majority of the South Vietnamese people who lived and worked in the countryside. President Thieu and his close advisor on agrarian reform and economic development, Mr. Cao Van Than were visionary enough to realize that here was no other way around that sad situation. They also were not under any illusion that this would not be a major and massive undertaking of epic proportion. And judging from past performance and the present political turmoil they entertained no notion that this would not be a highly intricate task nor something that could only be tackled at a more favorable time.

BUILDING AN OWNERSHIP SOCIETY FOR A RURAL SOCIAL REVOLUTION (III)

Implementation

To implement the LTTTP the following steps were taken:
1. Our MLRAD developed a detailed implementation plan and reorganized the division in charge, its Directorate General of Land Affairs (DGLA) from the highest to the lowest echelons, from central to local levels along the paper trail in order to execute the plan smoothly and rapidly. We also created a Regional Office in the Mekong Delta where 80% of the work would be carried out to speed up the liquidation of problems that could be solved by mid-level authority instead of channeling them all the way to central authority in Saigon. This would be a great time-saver at a time when communication was slow and transportation was scarce. Without this we would never be able to finish the job as fast as we did. At a time and in a country where people tended to concentrate authority to a few high officials, it was a credit to Minister Than’s organizational genius that we adopted this decentralization of power. We also created new organizations that would perform the inspection and investigation functions to make sure that the proper procedures and the right amount of work would be done according to the implementation plan laid out from central to regional on to provincial, all the way down to local riceroots levels. These organizations luckily were staffed by young dynamic and fearless technocrats, most of the time just right out of colleges. So their sense of duty was very high and their performance consequentially was very efficient as compared to those of an ingrained bureaucracy. You cannot do any effective work, especially the kind that requires timely coordination of a multitude of implementing set-up without good and strong investigative and inspective functions. These beefed-up organizations would handle the expected increased number of grievances and inquiries from all sides – tenant farmers and landowners and sudden flood of work volume. 
2. It was a stroke of genius on our part to adopt the unprecedented use of aerial photography to help map out and identify the land plots to be distributed with the provision that accurate official cadastral maps produced with surveying equipments would be done some time in the future to formalize and legalize the photo mapping when such work can be done at a leisurely pace. Otherwise, it would take decades to finish this gigantic program with conventional cadastral ways and means, especially when the country was caught in the middle of upsetting vagaries of war. 
3. The program called for also the extensive training of some 50,000 government employees at all levels on technical, procedural, and administrative issues. The MLRAD cadres were trained in house in land reform and land affairs by the DGLA. The Rural Development Cadres of the Ministry of Rural Reconstruction (renamed Ministry of Revolutionary Development in 1969) were trained in rural pacification and rural development at their sprawling Vung Tau Training Center run by Colonel Nguyen Van Be, a VC returnee who was very good at training cadres in doing things to defuse, deflect, derail, dismantle, decapitate, demolish, defeat, and destroy communist tactics and strategies in the countryside. Later they would be trained in land reform procedures on site by the DGLA technocrats and local authorities. The CIA supported his activities by building near Vung Tau a vast training complex for that purpose,
Minister Than sent me there one time to give a pep talk to a graduating class of cadres that would be assigned to the MLRAD to help implement the LTTTP in the villages, an experience I will never forget. After spending the evening dining with Colonel Be and his CIA advisers to discuss land reform matters, I was taken to the huge parade ground at 9:00 PM. It was pitch black because there was no light and no moon. I could not see a single word on my prepared speech at the podium to read. I spent several days preparing a highly motivating speech. I even delivered it in front of my extended family to see what they thought. The men said they wanted to join these cadres in this revolution and the women all cried their heart out. Even my mom wanted to give up the land she inherited from her landlord dad. It was that good, but I could not read it. While I was fumbling around behind the mike to find what to do about this unexpected and unsettling situation, I heard a blood-curling and ear-splitting series of yells, from what must easily be a reinforced division of cadres whose faces I could not see, welcoming me to the parade ground. My heart almost jumped out of my chest. So, what I did was to give a non-prepared rambling harangue on the main points that I still remembered, using my informal Southern farmers’ vernacular and interspersed with “bon mots” and low-keyed profanities for effects. I could cuss the communists as well as any drunken sailor. Judging from the laughs and applauses I could see that the audience of farm young folks really appreciated my impromptu talk. My Toastmasters training at OSU served me well. Colonel Be thought that my speech was the best he’d ever heard. Actually, he offered me a job there in case I was fired from my current one. The use of Rural Development Cadres at the riceroots level to carry the nitty-gritty chores of land mapping and identification as well as farmers’ applications collection on sites was another essential force multiplier and a welcome novelty by Minister Cao Van Than who happened to cumulate also the Ministry of Rural Development portfolio in 1969. 
The key tactical decision that accounted for our success was the decentralized work done by these armed RD Cadres, who were practically young peasants, and thus were very empathetic with the plight of their fellow farmers. Throughout the implementation of the LTTTP, the enemy increased their opposition as they saw our success. Of course, at all time these cadres were ably supervised by the Village Land Distribution Committee (VLDC) of the local Village Administrative Committee (VAC) and carefully trained in land reform work by our MLRAD technocrats. They were in turn closely monitored by our Provincial Land Affair Service (PLAS). It was also a stroke of genius that President Thieu let Minister Than cumulated also the Ministry of Rural development because there was no need for any time-consuming communication and coordination between the two ministries which were the main implementers of the LTTTP.
Notice that the VLDC was a group of about a half dozen of farmers’ peers (Village Chief, one Representative of the Village Council, Village Commissioner for Agriculture, Hamlet Chief of the hamlet involved, Village Land Registrar, a non-voting person from the Village Administrative Committee acting as Secretary) who did nothing but land reform work in the village government whereas the VAC was a dozen of officials—two of them elected by the villagers themselves: the Village Chief and his Deputy -- who had all kinds of other daily governing functions to do at the grassroots level such as security, pacification, development, administration.
4. Learning from previous experience of land distribution of the First RVN, to avoid tying up the court system with litigation, and in expecting the volume of litigation to be much higher this time, the LTTTP called for the establishment of a Special Land Court system to be created by the General Assembly outside of the normal judicial system to handle nothing but the more serious land dispute cases that the local village government could not mediate. Four Special Land Courts created under Ordinance 57 land reform program of the First Republic of Viet Nam existed already in Dinh Tuong, An Giang, Long An, and Saigon. If this court could not settle the cases referred to it by the litigious parties to their satisfaction, they will be referred to the highest authority to decide, which is the Central Land Reform Council (CLRC), an instrument of the executive branch of government made up of representatives of the Prime Minister, high officials of six ministries, and the Directorate General of Planning. The minor arbitration by the VAC was expected to settle the numerous minor land disputes and grievances stemming from the application of the law. The CLRC decision was final and non-appealable.
In our culture there are two major sources of constant disputes in society as this common saying reveals: nhut hau hon nhi dien tho—first is after marriage, when the groom finds out whether his bride is still virgin or not, and second is land affairs. Meanwhile, thirty existing provincial Court of First Instance of the judiciary branch would assume the function of the Special Land Courts for major cases in their respective jurisdiction free of charge. But the problem with this court was that they usually sided with the landlords because they did not understand very well either the letter and the spirit nor the revolutionary nature of the LTTT Law. That was why all provincial Land Court cases had to undergo a careful reviewed by the Central Agency for Land Courts (CAFLC) in the DGLA headquarters. The Commissioner of the CAFLC would present its recommendations on any case that it did not agree with the land court to the ultimate arbitrator, the NLRC for final judgment. 
Litigation was a major hold up during the previous land reform. Rich and educated landowners could hire sharp lawyers to drag on lawsuits for years. SVN, being a burgeoning democracy, had its fair share of bad lawyers as does any democratic country. But, thankfully we had very few contests and disputes of such magnitude—less than a 1,000 grievances and inquiries required arbitration at the central level. Out of the cases reviewed by the CAFLC fewer than 1% of them were referred to the highest authority: the CLRC. 
Most cases were settled by local government mediation with less than ten per cent being reported to the central authorities by local government. Local officials knew better the local people and local situation than any other entity and they were able to resolve the greatest majority of disputes and grievances because the officials were elected by the local people themselves. If you are interested in the detailed study of the grievances and dispute problems, consult Charles Callison’s PhD thesis where he analyzed almost a thousand cases that came up to the DGLA. There were less than 9,000 cases of complaints, grievances, disputes, contests, and inquiries of all sizes and all types stemming from the LTTTP. The majority of the rulings was in favor of the tenants. This was a mercilessly small amount of discord considering the massive scope of the program. All disputes were handled in a just, fair, legal, and humane manner, in the best democratic and constitutional tradition of a civilized people unlike the bloody, murderous, and inhumane North Vietnamese so-called agrarian reform.
5. And of course, we also needed military support by village and provincial governments to insure safe implementation. We had plenty of that because President Thieu quite often personally ordered the military commanders and the province chiefs who were all colonels or lieutenant colonels in the Army, often officers who had served under him in the not-too-distant past, to support the MLFAD’s local services in the implementation of his rural social revolution at these frequent regional gatherings when he personally pushed his accelerated pacification efforts. And when the President -- himself a three-star general -- told any authority to step on it, you can be certain that regional and provincial orders would go down to the village and hamlet level of government in a hurry. Some of these province chiefs were very good especially after he purged the bad apples out of his government. I remember there was at that time an egregiously bad province chief in Binh Dinh Province who was tried for corruption and sentenced to death. I remember also Colonel Quach Huynh Ha (a relative of Mrs. Thieu) who was the Province Chief of Bac Lieu, a big rice producer of the Mekong Delta. We test ran our LTTTP implementation machinery down there first to tune up all the cogs and wheels. Colonel Ha and his staff supervised and monitored our efforts daily on the spot and lit up so much fire under the bottom of everybody in charge that nobody could sit down on it anymore for any length of time. So, as a result we learned a lot about what not to do and had so much success there at first trial. 
The President distributed the first few hundred land titles to teary-eyes and black-pajama-clad farmers who received them with trembling and callous hands because it was the first time in the life of these poor people that they owned so much wealth. A hectare of rice land was worth between VN$150,000 and VN$200,000 at official price, a lot more on the free market. Delta farmers could receive as many as three hectares. So you could see the enormous wealth farmers received in a hurry. It was like winning the lottery jackpot. You can bet that these people would not listen to communist propaganda even if wily Ho Chi Minh personally told them himself morning, noon, and night and four times on the weekend. It was a sight that brought warmth to everybody’s heart and made all of us so determined to carry out this rural social revolution to the final conclusion. 
I remember after the completion of the LTTTP when I was DGA Chief wherever I went, farmers killed chickens and ducks to feast our delegation and drowned us in their potent rice or sorghum alcohol that knocked you down flat after the second drink. It did me one time in my uncle’s Tan Chau District of Chau Doc Province, my home town, which made me miss the Air America plane and we had to get home by car. I was glad that I was moved to another job after a couple years there or else, I swear, I would easily become an alcoholic. You just could not resist these friendly simple farmers’ hospitality and genuine kindness after we empower them with wealth!
Difficulties
To give you an idea as to what serious obstacles we were facing, here is a partial list of the major ones.
1. Naturally, security was absolutely the biggest problem. We endured constant enemy sabotage (assassination of our cadres, threat to farmers, incendiary propaganda to everybody). To this day I still think that letting the local government people at the hamlet and village levels carry out the program was the best decision Minister Than made (I don’t know why nobody ever thought of this before) as you could not get urban officials brave enough and dedicated enough, and knowledgeable enough about local conditions and local people to venture in the boonies for this dangerous work. There was no way we could protect our Ministry’s tens of thousands of unarmed land service officials and cadres if they had to do this work in the far-flung fields instead of our armed local RD cadres with the help of our Popular Forces.
2. Lack of official land records and cadastral maps due to successive wars over the years that destroyed most of our official land records was another major problem. Almost fifty per cent of land records were non-existing in SVN. This was the biggest headache in determining the accurate value of land for compensation. This problem made crosschecking to find out whether landlords owned lands in different places in the Delta, which was quite common, practically impossible.
3. Lack of transportation and roads to remote areas constituted almost an insurmountable obstacle. Work was done in more than 2,100 villages comprising some 12,000 hamlets. A lot of these places were not easily accessible due to lack of paved or dirt roads. One could get there only by sampans, which took a long time even with motorized ones. It would take decades to contact all the people concerned to do the necessary work if we did not use grassroots government officials who lived and worked in situ. 
4. Lack of good mass communication to farmers in remote places was a big delaying factor. There was no phone, no telegraph, no mail service, not even pigeons or smoke signals to these places. Communication was done only face to face. Again decentralization of land reform work helped alleviate this difficulty.
5. Lack of trained personnel due to military draft from both sides was also a major headache. SVN had 1,100,000 able young men at their prime age under arms at that time. This was the kind of strenuous, and often, dangerous work where women and older folks were unsuitable. Only a handful of trained professional land surveyors were available in the whole country and they usually were the Chief of the PLAS. 
6. Lack of tools of the trade such as land-surveying and map-making equipments was another drawback. SVN was a poor third-world country ravaged by incessant wars since the beginning of the Second World War that depleted both its human and material resources. We solved that with the use of military aerial photography. 
7. Lack of satisfactory aerial photos—I wish we had Google Map! The aerial photos taken by fast flying jets (The USAF F-4 Phantoms reconnaissance planes) high up in the sky in weather that was seldom ideal sometimes were of quite poor quality. There were clouds that blocked a clear view of many rice fields bringing about long wait before a retake, causing unavoidable delay. Everyone wished these pilots would fly below cloud cover for more detailed and clearer photos. 
8. Lack of funding appeared to be the most limiting factor: It was estimated that the program would cost anywhere from $450-750 million according to our best assessment, mostly for landowners compensation and other implementation costs. But governments are notorious about cost overrun. We got $10,000,000 from President Nixon when we ramped up the program and another $40,000,000 of counterpart fund for later expenses, but none of this could be directly used for compensating landowners. It was used to import goods for resale to generate fund for our budget to ease inflationary pressure due to compensation money being printed.
9. Lack of time for ramping up organization for such a mammoth task to meet the three-year timeline turned out to be the least upsetting. President Thieu ordered that the mammoth program be implemented on a crash basis for maximum political impact at a time when our struggle for survival against the destructive and evil ideology of our foe reached its zenith. We organized and reorganized in pre-trial and on the job, but everything worked out well thanks to the utter dedication, unwavering courage, and self-effacing sacrifice of the majority of the people in charge.
10. Evasion of the law by landowners was expected to be an obstacle to the smooth implementation of the government program of this type. The attempts by unscrupulous or influential landlords in connivance with corrupted or cooperative officials to circumvent the law in anticipation of its passage by the General Assembly, which was hotly debating the matter for eight months, created some difficulties in a few provinces. The majority of the cases involved illegal designation of ancestral worship lands and prime lands that the landlords wanted to distribute to their relatives in order to retain them under the law. 
As it could be visualized from the previous discussion, the working environment was extremely challenging. But we were able to overcome all of that thanks to presence of the following many favorable enabling factors:

BUILDING AN OWNERSHIP SOCIETY FOR A RURAL SOCIAL REVOLUTION (IV)


1. First off, the exceptional determination and relentless monitoring by the top political and administrative leaders, from the President on down.
We would never be able to accomplish this formidable job on time without President Thieu directly or indirectly prodding anybody who was responsible for action on a monthly basis—Prime Minister, ministers, regional commanders, province chiefs, etc. During the first attempt at land reform by President Ngo Dinh Diem, so many loopholes, exceptions, and ambiguous language in the implementation decrees gutted the program and made it unworkable. The people who drafted these decrees were clever in their use of ambiguous words that led easily to misinterpretation to circumvent the law. But this time round, all our leaders were determined to carry out this revolution to success. Minister Than was a sharp lawyer himself, so there were few ambiguities in the language of the law leading to possible skewed interpretation of the law in the drafted implementation decrees. Every important proposition was clearly defined and specified to obviate possible misunderstanding of purpose. This could explain the low volume of disputes in the LTTTP compared to the previous agrarian reform program.
An anecdote will help me to illustrate this point: I remember at the last high-level meeting at our Ministry with the Directorate General of Land Affairs to review the final implementation plan of the LTTTP prior to launching, Mr. Bui Huu Tien, the new young Director General of Land Affairs pulled me aside at the conclusion of the meeting and asked in all seriousness, “Did you have any special directive as to how to deal with the land holdings of our government big shots to tell me privately what to do.” The Director of Cabinet was the conduit to pass on special sensitive instructions to lower officials on behalf of the Minister or to relay upward on behalf of rank-and-file people any sensitive matter that could not be voiced publicly. I was taken aback by that unexpected inquiry, but managed to reply, “No, but I will ask the boss and let you know.”
It was a sensitive matter so I asked Assistant Minister Nguyen Thanh Qui to make sure to ask Minister Than at an appropriate time for clarification. Shortly afterwards Mr. Qui told me that Minister Than said this, “There is absolutely no special favor for anyone. Not the President, not the Prime-Minister, nor anybody else. Strictly apply the law in its entirety.” That was exactly what I wanted to hear because there was just no way in a democracy to run a program of this importance and magnitude if there were exceptions to the rules and regulations designed to carry out the law. In fact, when I got back to Mr. Tien, I told him, “Here is strict order from the Minister himself, ‘There will be absolutely no exception to the law.’ And don’t let anyone anywhere anyhow tell you otherwise. In fact, if I were you I would begin with the expropriation and distribution of the big shots’ land holdings if any as an example of our leaders’ determination. By the way, I want you to get all the Do’s clan’s lands in Chau Doc and elsewhere distributed first. That includes Do Thi Phat (My Mom)’s land and all her uncles’ and their descendants’ holdings. And please, I don’t want to read on any newspaper any time soon embarrassing stories that the MLRAD Director of the Cabinet’s relatives’ lands were not distributed.” None of my siblings wanted to become farmers either. President Thieu’s and his relatives’ lands in Ninh Thuan Province, the First Lady’s family’s lands in Dinh Tuong Province, the Prime-Minister’s and his relatives’ lands in Kien Giang Province were also gone pretty quick, I was told. 
The funny thing was that when I saw my mom a couple months later, she asked me, “What did you do, son? Our relatives did not want to talk to me or to invite me to the ancestors’ worship banquet (dam gio or cung com) anymore. They said you ordered your people to get rid of their lands first before they could do anything.” To that I said, “Mom, it’s the law of the land. I could not do a doggone thing about it. Even the President and his wife and the Prime Minister and his wife had their lands expropriated. Blame your brother. He helped pass the law in the Lower House. There is nothing anybody can do this time anyway. They shut down all loopholes, Mom” Then my Mom came back with, “Yeah, but you don’t have to apply the law to them from day one. President Diem did not go to this length last time.” I had my last words, “That’s why we did not accomplish much in land reform during the First Republic or the seven years afterwards. Ask Duong Tu Trinh (= Uncle Four Trinh = My Mom’s cousin who was the former DGLA Chief) and he’ll tell you all about this. That’s also why we are fighting this stupid war right now, Mom. If the communists win, our relatives not only will lose all their lands, but they also will have their heads plowed off as the communists did to landlords in North Viet Nam way back. Here at least they have five hectares of ancestral worship left and get compensated for the rest.” As I recall, I didn’t know anybody in the Do clan tilled the lands anywhere.
To be honest I was not as close to or as comfortable with my mom’s father’s mandarin clan as to her mother’s Hoa-Hao peasantry clan. Her father married up to a very rich family in Chau Doc, but his wife could not bear any offspring. Then he got the beautiful daughter of one of his tenant farmers pregnant and had my mom out of wedlock. Before his death from diabetes he finally had his legitimate wife reluctantly adopt my mom as their legitimate daughter and had her Huynh last name switch to his Do last name to inherit a small part of his fortune. My father was dirt-poor and did not own even a piece of land to pitch a tent when he married my mom. His father was a chef in an a noodle shop and he helped out with the clientele. My mom must have really liked his noodle to marry him after a few years of patronizing there.
I relate this story to emphasize our leaders’ determination in this social revolution and my humble roots and to stress the fact that President Thieu entrusted his important rural programs to men of humble origins to carry them out with vigor, speed, integrity, and expediency instead of the landlords or the ruling upper mandarin class. People with humble background tended to empathize with the disenfranchised farmers. President Thieu, Minister Cao Van Than, and his team, the main players in this rural revolution at its inception all came from humble origins.
2. We had also a relentless effort of personnel at all levels of the MLRAD in Saigon and in the provinces. We saw extraordinary dedication and sacrifice of our lowest RD cadres in 2,100 villages where actual distribution work was initiated, performed, and completed. They all performed above and beyond the call of duty in a very hostile environment. They bore the brunt of our enemies’ wrath in this trying undertaking. And these people in the field were instrumental in our tremendous success. Without filed cadres of all levels of this quality and devotion to the task at hands, it would be impossible to jump start and complete this rural social revolution.
3. We enjoyed effective coordination among different ministries of our government and military authorities at different levels. Military authority at the regional level was most helpful because without good security it would be quasi-impossible to do land reform in the boonies. Provincial military capability sometimes could not handle certain security problem. The success of pacification that our provincial government obtained under President Thieu’s relentless pressure was a tremendous boost to our MLRAD’s programs achievements, not just in land reform but also in concurrent agricultural development.
In this connection I’d like to relate a story that illustrated my good relationship with a MR Commander. I always believe that one of the reasons our Land To The Tiller Program was carried out so successfully and so fast was the close supervision of its implementation at different levels of the government. I remember doing some of this work on behalf of Minister Than at the grassroots level where the program was implemented. Every chance I got to travel in the provinces for meetings I always asked our chiefs of different provincial services (Truong Ty) to take me to various remote places where the different programs of our Ministry were implemented to see first-hand how things were. You can call these unplanned visits surprise inspection. 
I always made a point to inquire of the village notables and the villagers I met about how things were and what our officials were doing to help them in order to have an idea as to what was going on. I rarely announced beforehand these side trips for obvious security reason. You had much better survival chance when you caught your enemy off guard to reduce their potential and their propensity to harm you. Afterwards, I reported to the Minister about any problem I discovered rather than relying on official reports by the different directorates which tended to be always rosy and slow. Our officials in the fields really feared these fact-finding tours because it could lead to someone losing his job due to poor performance or derelict of duty when these situations were egregiously bad. Having an uncle who is the Chairman of the Lower House Agricultural Committee was very helpful. I usually asked my uncle to find out for me bottlenecks or hang-ups in his fellow representatives’ constituency districts for me to unravel when I did my inspection. Armed with these knowledges from the representatives and feedbacks from my ministry officialdoms, I could effectively intervene for appropriate help at the regional or provincial levels of government to clear obstacles to the smooth implementation of our programs.
Not too many high officials in our government liked to make these fact-finding tours in a time of raging war. Let me let you in on a secret as to why I dared do that. When I was growing up my mom often told me that when I was born she consulted a couple of fortune tellers. And they all said that I was born under very propitious stars that would lead to a long and comfortable life. She repeated that so many times in so many different circumstances that I almost believed her. But, to make it doubly certain when I began to work for the government I checked that prediction again by consulting a famous palm reader in the capital who said pretty much the same thing. In fact, to play it safe still, I even consulted another one in Taipei, Taiwan during one of my overseas official tour there, believe me or not. You should have seen the eyes of that Taiwanese official acting as my guide when I asked him to take me to a good English-speaking fortune teller. “You want to see who?” asked the guide incredulously. There was no English speaking fortune teller in Taipei. So the guide had to be the interpreter. Sure enough this fortune teller there confirmed what I had known all along for a long time. 
So armed with this highly confirmed knowledge, I dared to go where no high official had gone before in all my official duty work. My American advisers loved this. And so, they invariably provided me with so many flights of fixed wings and helicopters of Air America, the CIA airline, to go to all over South Viet Nam any time I needed even towards the end of the American military involvement when, due to budgetary constraints, these flights were quite limited. I must have logged more flight time than any other official in our government in the eight years as an implementer of government programs. One time an adventurous low level American adviser even sneaked me on a C-130 loaded with GI’s on R&R going to Manila without a visa because I wanted to pick the brain of a certain rice scientist at IRRI about some Miracle Rice issues before flying home the next day with some new seeds that I illegally smuggled out of the Philippines for testing in SV.
I remember at one regional meeting with the MR III Commander, Lt. General Do Cao Tri, the South Viet Namese George Patton, at his headquarters in Bien Hoa to review the Accelerated Pacification and Land-To-The-Tiller Program implementation in his area of responsibility. I represented my MLRAD in these meetings to unravel difficulties at the highest local level because land ownership title distribution was a HES (Hamlet Evaluation System) target of pacification. This was an indication that President attached very high priority to his LTTTP implementation.
General Do Cao Tri knew me because his younger brother, Dr. Do Cao Hue was a fellow veterinarian like me and managed the Directorate of Livestock Production and Protection whom I asked to put in a few good words to his brother on my behalf. In Viet Nam personal acquaintance and connection went a long way in getting things done. And Dr. Hue owed me big time when I saved his 500 breeding pigs. 
So, I wasn’t surprised when at the end of the meeting he asked me to step in his office for a private visit. General Tri didn’t let to sit down when he rattled annoyingly, “Doctor, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to get me in trouble with the higher ups or what? My province chiefs complained to me that you’ve been wandering around in their territories without letting them know when and where you were coming and going. Some of these areas are pretty insecure and you just can’t go wherever you want without local authority’s knowledge or protection. They know their areas much better than you do. I just can’t afford to have a high official of the government kidnapped by the VC for exchange with one of theirs in our custody! Is it too much to ask you to let the local authority know of your travel plan in their area of responsibility? I know you have important work to do, but there is no reason to be careless.” I was taken aback for a few seconds then managed to say, “General, you know that if I announced ahead of time where I go, my people would give me a staged visit and our Ministry could not get a clear picture of what going on in the boonies. Besides, what make you so sure that if I announce my visit the VC spies will not know about it and spring a surprise reception for our central delegation? By the way, General, I love your brilliant bold moves of late in kicking our enemy butts in Cambodia. Can we expect to see some more of that in the days ahead? I bet you didn’t tell your province chiefs way beforehand where and when you were coming and going then either, did you?” He cracked a smile and untied his Smith and Wesson pistol holster. This scared me to death not knowing what he intended to do. If you saw my face, it probably looked ashen white. Anyway, handing me his pistol, he said, “Here, keep this gift and have it handy when you need it. Make sure you learn how to use it first. And remember not to shoot if your enemy is more than three meters (ten feet) away. You will miss him. If you have to use it, make sure to save the last bullet to blow up your brain if need be. You don’t want to be captured by the VC’s and neither do I. It’s a fate much worse than death.” And so, I was probably the only civilian in our government to carry a Smith and Wesson while wandering all over the creation. A short time afterwards General Tri died in a helicopter accident while conducting his troops during the invasion of Cambodia. SVN lost her best son. I could not hold my tears during the long eulogy poem by General Vy. I wished he were alive when Van Tien Dung launched his offensive in the highlands. The outcome might be much different.
4. Last but not least, we also received valuable assistance from the US military on aerial mapping of land use and from the US Agency for International Development (USAID)/Saigon on the use of computer to print land titles and keep land records and for expertise on organization and on land management. Above all we received from the US government the valuable funding to launch and then to carry on the LTTTP: the initial $10,000,000 during the gearing up phase and the subsequent $40,000,000 during the implementation phase in the form of CIP funding to help stemming out the inflationary pressure from the landowners’ compensation funding.
Actually, I got from the Americans more things to work with than any other executives. Let me cite a few examples:
Our MLRAD needed vehicles and we didn’t have fund for such luxury items. So, I enlisted assistance from my counterpart Robert Sweet, a USAID/Saigon Assistant Director. He took me to the vast Long Binh Army Logistic Base and showed me hundreds of discarded Ford sedans, the car fleet of American officials in Viet Nam waiting for disposal as junk. A lot of them would still be in good working condition with minor repairs or minor dressings or with clever Viet Namese tinkering. Bob asked me if I could put to good use these vehicles and I promptly said why not. We went to see the general commanding the base and Bob told him that the MLRAD needed these sedans to implement the land reform program and pronto the following week we had our Directorate of Farm Mechanization tow dozens of these cars home to their shops and other garages to work on cannibalizing, fixing, and upgrading these Ford sedans for our use. All of a sudden our MLRAD was the envy of other ministries. Even our Minister got his almost brand new big sedan as every other big shot in the Ministry. So we never had transportation problem for years going everywhere in our work or our inspection trips. That was until the big oil squeeze hit us in 1973. 
I then worked on office supplies as I saw mountains of still serviceable filing cabinets, desks, IBM electric typewriters, etc. that we could easily and profitably recondition for use for years to come. When I visited my dying mother in 2005 and had a chance to visit my old DGA office, I still saw some of the sturdy metallic desks I got thirty years earlier still serviceable!
Results
Yes, all this blood, sweat, and tears were worth it considering the remarkable results achieved that were at the heart of the Second Republic’s spectacular rural social revolution.
Despite the war and constant concerted efforts by the communists to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat the program, impressive goals were achieved right on target: 
The program was practically completed by the first quarter of 1973 when more than 2,750,000 acres of rice land and secondary crops lands were distributed to some 900,000 families, thus, greatly exceeding the set targets of 2,500,000 acres and 800,000 families. Remember that number 900,000 that I asked you to pay attention to? This is it. Practically, there were no more tenant farmers in SVN: zero, zilch, none. We were done! There were farm laborers working for hire for landowners who tilled their own fifteen hectares of rice field that they were allowed to keep or the five hectares of ancestral worship land exempted from expropriation or in some religious lands. Actually, if you take into consideration the number of people given residual lands from previous land reform still in government hands prior to the LTTTP implementation, the number of families benefitting from this social revolution were more than 1,200,000 and if you multiply this number by seven, the average size of the Viet Namese family you can see that SVN countryside would be populated mainly by middle class people. This was the most massive change of social status in the history of human civilization, exactly as President Thieu promised. I keep digging in world history annals to see where something like this happened in the past anywhere. I couldn’t find any. Talking about social revolution! No one was discussing seriously about this anywhere for forty years! It was such a glaring oversight. Now you could read about land reform in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, but it took them years and the scale was much smaller. Yet land reform did wonders for these countries’ economic development. Just think of the possibilities if South Viet Nam had not been abandoned by its allies!
President Thieu solemnly and proudly declared that the LTTTP was successfully completed on the third Farmers’ Day Celebration in Can Tho, in the heart of the Mekong Delta on March 26, 1973. I was literally crying of joy listening to that famous speech. So were a lot of other officials. I swear, I even saw US Ambassador Bunker’s eyes well up. Good old Bunker, the best American friend SVN ever had! I forgot all the sleepless nights or trials and tribulations I underwent for more than a month organizing the biggest agricultural fair there. Looking at the happy and smiling faces of the hundreds of sample peasants gathered there from the entire nation to receive their precious titles of land ownership from the President, I felt as happy and gratified as when I won the USAID Leadership Training Scholarship, when I received my DVM degree, when I got married, and when my first son was born all lumped together. I played a significant role in this unique, massive, and revolutionary undertaking.
This impressive feat not only drastically changed the lives of almost 7,000,000 rural people almost overnight, but also completely remade SVN for years to come, something that even the brutal communist North Viet Namese’s coercive, authoritarian, brutal, and oppressive machine could not unravel for more than a decade. And we did all that without gruesome bloodshed, irreparable injustice, and flagrant inhumane treatment towards any class of citizens in our society. 
This great accomplishment was at the origin of the rapid agricultural development of our country, which laid down for all time the rock-solid undeniable foundation for food production of Viet Nam. A thousand years from now, if anyone studies the great economic development of Viet Nam, he or she will certainly recognize that the revolutionary land redistribution of the Second Republic of Viet Nam was the powerful spark that jumpstarted the economic engine of the country and fired up the productive power of the Vietnamese people.

BUILDING AN OWNERSHIP SOCIETY FOR A RURAL SOCIAL REVOLUTION (V - End)

Impacts 

Finally, I will discuss about the life-changing impacts of the LTTTP, the most important and lasting legacy the Second Republic of Viet Nam left its citizens. I said IMPORTANT because in the history of building our country, there was no undertaking this massive that affected that many people and I said LASTING because a hundred years or even a thousand years from now when historians look back to this juncture of our history, they still will find that the LTTTP features predominantly as the foremost achievement of the Second Republic of Viet Nam that had far reaching repercussion in the country development when all else that had been done at that time was all but forgotten, leaving no trace.
And so, try to remember the following assertions when I discuss the economic, social, and political impacts of the LTTTP in our country which is what this rural revolution, born in the muddy rice fields of the Mekong Delta, was all about. This was what President Thieu more than anything else wanted to do for his country and its people in the first place and what he should be remembered for generations to come and not his military blunder incurred in the dry desolate highlands. 
Economic:
The first economic impact was an almost immediate increase in agricultural production of epic proportion that our country has never experienced before in its 2000 years of history.
And this was because concurrent with the land reform program President Thieu also launched an ambitious agricultural development program that was aimed at rapidly making South Viet Nam self-sufficient in food production as the basis for the country’s overall economic development.
With abundant agri-inputs made readily available to them, new landowners had greater incentives to risk more, invest more in costly modern commercial farming, work harder, thus produce more and consume more than do destitute tenant farmers of yore. This effect reverberated beneficially and positively to all other economic sectors especially the nascent consumer goods industries.
The initiative centered around the Accelerated Miracle Rice Production Program (AMRPP) which jumpstarted the Green Revolution in Asia. As Director General of Agriculture I was in charge of its crash implementation and expansion phase for the years 1972 and 1973 which saw the acreage of high-yield rice shoot up to roughly 890,000 acres accounting for 53% of the total 6,700.000 metric tons of rice paddy (lua) equivalent to 4,400,000 metric tons of processed rice (gao) produced in the ‘73-‘74 harvest season, enough to feed the entire South Vietnamese population at that time. Rice sufficiency was finally achieved after ten years of deficiency even in the middle of a raging war. According to UN/FAO, SVN, Laos, Burma, Cambodia, and Bangladesh are the countries that have the highest annual per capita consumption of processed rice in the world: 150 kg to 170 kg. At even the highest rate of consumption the amount of rice we produced that harvest season was adequate to feed more than 20,000,000 people, even taking into consideration all the waste, loss, and damage in production, processing, transportation, storage, and distribution. Actually, this was a conservative estimate from official statistics because there was no way of accounting for farmers planting Miracle Rice on their own initiatives outside the government-censored program once they saw their neighbors reaping tremendous rewards from modern farming using high yield varieties and latest chemical agri-inputs.
Then, the second economic impact was even more meaningful because it was the goal we wanted to achieve first off in our rural social revolution: the rapid improvement in income of the poorest segment of our population.
Farmers no longer shared as much as half of their harvest with their landlords or paid as high as sixty per cent interest to money lenders. For the first year as new landowners they did not have to pay any rent or tax—the very first time in their life. All of a sudden, they could enjoy the entire fruit of their hard labor. It was like millions of people winning the lottery. They now had a large chunk of disposable income they could use to build their new life and jumpstart a seemingly much brighter future. Just thanks to this rent and tax relief alone during the first year of land ownership, new landowners had a whopping 50% increase in their disposable income immediately even without planting high-yield rice variety or applying modern farming. 
However, with 2.5 acres of land properly using modern technology and cultivating high-yield rice varieties, producing 3-4 times native rice, a farmer could easily net VN$100,000 (US$850 at current official exchange rate) per harvest.
And that’s nothing, because he would earn two to four times as much if he could farm two to four crops a year as was possible in some areas with additional irrigation in dry season and with new Miracle Rice varieties having short maturation—90-100 days as compared to 120-150 days for native rice strains. 
But wait, that’s not very impressive either considering the fact that with 7.5 acres as the law allows him to have in the Mekong Delta, he could earn overnight theoretically an astounding VN$1.2 million (more than US$10,000) a year, or almost forty times the per capita income of third-world South Viet Nam. With the unofficial rate of exchange it would be half as much, but still it would be a sizeable amount of money to be able to acquire in such short time. For poor farmers at the bottom of our societal scale all their lives this amount of money was an enormous fortune to be accumulated in such a short time. That was why we called this drastic change a life-changing revolution (Cuoc Cach Mang Doi Doi)—the overnight creation of a rural middle class encompassing the majority of our rural people who had been a short time earlier the poorest majority of South Viet Nam.
When I was the Director General of Agriculture I always heard farmers told me they won the lottery jackpot because the only way for poor people to become millionaire was to buy the weekly government Reconstruction Lottery and won the jackpot. That’s why they called the Miracle Rice “Honda rice” because they could afford all kinds of Honda products now with a good Miracle Rice harvest: moped, water pump, tiller, generator, harvester, thresher, dryer, etc.
I have to share with you this story to illustrate my point. In 2005 I went back to South Viet Nam to see my dying mother for the last time and met two of my fortyish nieces in Cu Lao Ba Island in the middle of the Hau Giang tributary of the Mekong River in Chau Doc Province where my Mom was born and grew up. These two single women were farming their ten hectares of high yield rice for export under the communist regime and growing huge catfish on the side. Because their land had plenty of water being on an island, they were able to grow three crops of broadcast high yield rice (Lua xa) a year [People don’t replant rice (lua cay) anymore because it is too labor-intensive and time-consuming to use the transplant method]. They said they could grow four crops but they wanted to have fun three months each year. I forgot to ask them how they did that without having a husband apiece. I did some quick calculations and was flabbergasted that they were making more money being commercial rice and fish farmers in dollar term than I was doing here in the USA with two businesses. They asked me to find them each a willing American husband to marry them in order to immigrate to this country. I told them bluntly to stay put over there to make a living because they would not make that much money over here not having a university education and looking weather-beaten dark brown from working in the ricefields. Besides, it would not be easy to find Americans willing to marry old South Viet Namese farmers even loaded ones.
The third economic impact was the projected influence of the landowners’ vast amount of compensation money injected into the economy. There was genuine concern about the negative impact of inflationary pressure on the South Viet Nam’s fragile economy. Some answer to this concern could be found in the two studies made near the end of this program: one between August 1971 and September 1972 by Charles Callison, a PhD candidate in four villages of four Delta provinces—Long An, Dinh Tuong, Phong Dinh, and An Giang; the other was made between January and June 1972 in forty four villages of nine Mekong delta provinces by Henry Bush of the Control Data Corporation for USAID and the GVN. Both studies showed that compensation money only generated small economic impact. But these studies were small (less than a thousand landowners and tenant farmers in each study) and too close to the end of the program for full impact.
Anyway, most big landlords lived in cities and in France. There were not too many industries for compensated landowners to invest their money in. Anecdotal findings revealed a lot of them invested their money in some sort of business. In the big Do Clan I witnessed the following businesses cropping up after the LTTTP: my Great Uncle Gaston Do Van Diem went into sea food and fish sauce business, my Great Uncle Charles Do Van Kia built sixty units of condo for rent, my Mom invested her money in commercial chick hatchery business, and a slew of uncles and aunts, cousins, nephews, and nieces opened up all kinds of retail shops like tailor shops, restaurants, bakeries, construction supplies, dime stores, clothing stores, groceries, rice and chicken merchants and retail outlets. Even the relatives, who did not farm before but with increased security, found that modern commercial rice farming was quite lucrative and decided to jump on the gravy train. 
And that was just one clan. Viet Namese are very hard-working, resourceful, and enterprising people as you can see among the refugees who came to this country. They would not sit on their money to let inflation sap its value nor would they squander it all in just consumer goods. This was why we never had uncontrollable inflation even at the heights of the war. 
Social: 
Next, let’s talk about social impact. It’s not too shabby either! This was undoubtedly another huge and desirable goal to reach for our regime.
Farmers no longer felt like slaves or indentured servants. They wouldn’t have to spend their entire life in virtual bondage at the mercy of landlords and money lenders from generation to generation.
They now owned a major piece of property, a means to drastically improve their livelihood and a perennial source of income till the end of time. This property was worth at least VN$150,000-VN$200,000 (US$1,300-1,700) per hectare as per official evaluation for landowner compensation, but worth a lot more on the open market. With the proceed from exploiting that property, they could acquire the niceties of life: houses that are bigger, more durable, more comfortable, better-equipped-with-modern-amenities, and better-looking. They would not mind spending time, labor, and money to improve their newly acquired property to improve its productivity and its value. They now fully benefitted from the fruit of their hard labor. They would now have things that they could only dream of before: TV, radio, sewing machine, refrigerator, kitchen appliances, watches, Honda moped, motorized boat, tractors, mechanical tillers, dryers, electricity generators…anything of value that money could buy.
They could now build wealth not just for themselves, but also as an inheritance to pass on to their next generation, something they never could achieve before. They could educate their children so that they would become someone someday instead of having them bound to a harsh life that offered not much hope and promised not brighter future. This was the kind of life that bred social injustice and fomented communist class warfare that caused so much death and suffering, political upheaval and social unrest in the 21st Century worldwide. 
This most disfranchised segment of our society now finally had concrete social justice as enshrined in article 19 of their country’s constitution, and upheld by their leader. They saw their lives take a 180-degree turn around and moving upwards at a rapid pace.
Political:
Last but not least, how about the political impact? I think this was the most important impact of all. This was much more relevant to what President Thieu was hoping to achieve because of the following reasons: 
The LTTTP redressed social inequities in rural society by greatly narrowing the have and the have-not divide. It decreased rural disaffection and, thus, the insurgency potential and rebellion tendency of disaffected peasants (tiem nang noi day va khuynh huong tao loan cua nong dan bat man) , which was the source of constant war fomented by external forces and foreign ideology (mam mong chien tranh trien mien khoi xuong boi nhung the luc ngoai dia va y thuc he ngoai lai).
The results convinced farmers that the government they elected actually went to extra length to help them acquire private property, served them instead of exploiting them, tended to their daily needs and requirements instead of exacting labor and wealth from them, and that the social revolution that their leaders often promised was real and life-changing unlike empty promises and unreasonable taxation without representation by the communists.
It created support for and identification with the national government, the one that really changed their lives for the better by providing them with everything they needed to achieve that goal. It reduced the farmers’ traditional tendency towards neutralism, their proclivity for skepticism toward established political authority, their inclination towards political indifference, and finally their propensity for social cynicism. It created unity and mutual trust among farmers, local officials, and local military personnel, ingredients that promote political stability and security. It’s such a win-win situation. 
If this is not democracy at its grassroots best, governance at its fairest level, and nation-building at its most productive and mutually beneficial form, I don’t know what it is. This is the end that every political system has been trying to achieve for its citizenry since civilization began.
As Charles Callison concluded in his post-Land-To-The-Tiller PhD research, “One of the ironies of the tragic conflict in Viet Nam is that by 1975 the RVN had apparently won the war of insurgency, considered the more intractable threat by their American ally, and then lost the conflict to a conventional invading army, due to reduced logistical support and a classic battlefield blunder.” This speaks volume of the remarkable success of this visionary and revolutionary land reform program. But I didn’t need a learned and scientific study of a PhD thesis to come to the same conclusion from my eye witness of events in the countryside, my encounters with farmers in the villages, my conversations with province chiefs, and the reports of my local service chiefs. We won the struggle for the heart and mind of the rural population after the completion of the LTTTP in 1973. The communists would have to resort to naked and massive war of invasion after they lost the war of insurgency to impose their brutal inhumane authoritarian and coercive regime on the freedom-loving people of South Viet Nam.
Conclusion
The LTTTP was the most remarkable and lasting achievement by the Second RVN, all the more remarkable because it was carried out in the middle of the most vicious and protracted war of aggression.
None of this could have been accomplished without the wisdom, the vision, the determination, and the courage that President Nguyen Van Thieu showed in his agonizing decision to favor the rural disfranchised peasants whose loyalty and support for his regime were still very much in question, even while the urban folks’ anti-communism and allegiance were never in doubt.
However in so doing, President Thieu gave a tremendous boost to his rural social revolution and positioned his nation towards rapid economic development the like of which had been seen in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan after similar land reform program in the middle of the 20th Century.
It was an utterly irony that all of these achievements were negated by the military setbacks on the battlefields at the hands of a ruthless and implacable enemy. But these accomplishments laid out such a rock-solid foundation so highly conducive to human endeavor and for economic progress that they were impervious to the hand-handed intervention and coercive manipulation of the new masters who were fanatically oblivious of all immutable economic principles and deliberately ignorant of all recognized human nature.

(Zorro gửi tặng. ttngbt cảm ơn vì đã được phép đăng loạt bài giá trị này)

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Tham khảo một số bộ tem thời đó:

26.03.1970 BAN HÀNH LUẬT NGƯỜI CÀY CÓ RUỘNG


Bộ tem 26.03.1970 BAN HÀNH LUẬT NGƯỜI CÀY CÓ RUỘNG

Ngày trọng đại này Bưu điện không kịp chuẩn bị tem phát hành nên sử dụng bộ tem "Cải Cách Điền Địa" năm 1959 để đóng dấu kỷ niệm.

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