decentralized control over much of the labor process, benefiting the cooperative members, consisting of mostly peasant households. A cooperative thus distributed land to each household. The responsibility for production shifted down from the level of the cooperatives to the production brigades and from the brigades to the peasant households, which, in principle, took over the tasks that were formerly performed by the cooperative, namely, the tasks of growing plants, weeding, applying fertilizer, and harvesting. This output contract system provided incentives for increased output by setting a production quota for the households, a quota that was determined on the basis of productivity of the land during the previous three years. Peasant households were allowed to keep or sell surpluses on the private markets or to the state trading agencies at “negotiated prices” (Vo 1990). In mid-1981, along with drastic price regulation measures, procurement prices for agricultural goods were increased to the same level as market prices (Beresford and Fforde 1996). In addition, control stations that were established along main transportation routes in order to check illegal circulation of state-controlled goods, which led to the situation of ngan song, cam cho (river damming and market banning), were abolished