Rice Exports Leave Vietnam’s Farmers Knee-Deep in Profits

Buoyed by Vietnam’s record rice exports last year, Ngo Thi Mui is feeling pretty good about life these days. She is turning a tidy profit from the family’s rice paddies, and she and her five children have purchased a motor scooter and a television.

“It’s been a good crop, thanks to a lot of rain,” said the 47-year-old Mui, barely pausing as she worked her way down a row of rice, grabbing a clump of stems in her left hand and clipping them close to the ground with her sickle.

These paddies near Hanoi where she stands barefooted in knee-deep water are emerald green. As far as the eye can see, scores of farmers in conical hats and long-sleeved black shirts are, like Mui, bent over the precious crop that is the life staff for most Southeast Asian nations.

That Vietnam has become the world’s second leading rice exporter after Thailand, sending 4.2 million tons of rice abroad last year, represents one of the region’s great agricultural success stories. As recently as 1986, Vietnam was a rice importer and facing famine.

At that point, the Communist government admitted that its attempts to run farms as state enterprises were a disaster, and it moved to provide incentives. In a dramatic policy shift, it permitted farmers to buy, sell or lease land--though the state remains the ultimate owner of all land in Vietnam--and to keep a share of production profits. In Mui’s case, she can keep or sell what she produces after giving her cooperative 80 pounds of rice a year.

Rice production has been increasing steadily since 1986. The great rice revival has brought modest prosperity to Vietnam’s farmers, who account for 80% of the country’s 77 million people, and helped cushion the blow of the Asian economic crisis. Thailand’s farmers also have benefited from the growing demand for rice, especially because the export market is dominated by dollars, not local currency.

Archeological evidence suggests rice has been sustaining Asians for more than 5,000 years. It is nourishing and filling and contains 80% carbohydrates. Whereas Americans eat only 22 pounds of rice a person each year, people in Asia annually consume up to 400 pounds each, according to the International Rice Research Institute in Manila.

“Oh, I suppose I could eat a potato once,” Mui says, “but if I didn’t have rice, I think I would starve.” Like many Asians, she eats rice at all three meals, sometimes mixing it with vegetables or, on special occasions, meat.

Rice plays a political and social role in Southeast Asia that goes well beyond its value as a commodity. Because it is the region’s staple food and the source of livelihood for so many, the availability and price of rice is often a measure of political and social stability.

Riots that led to the resignation of Indonesian President Suharto in May started with cries of “down with rice prices!” A drought last year raised concerns in the Philippines that inadequate rice supplies in the countryside could lead to civil unrest. And in 1945, when Japanese occupiers hoarded Vietnam’s rice harvest for their own soldiers, 2 million Vietnamese died.

After record global rice trade that reached nearly 27 million tons last year, many agricultural experts are predicting overall rice exports will level off or decline in 1999. That would be bad news for Vietnamese and Thai farmers but good news for strife-torn Indonesia, which would be able to buy rice at lower prices.

None of which greatly worries Mui, the Vietnamese farmer. “I can always eat what I don’t sell,” she says.