After reunification in 1975, it was apparent that the war against America left Vietnam with severely damaged infrastructures and enterprises. It was estimated that 60 percent of villages were destroyed in South Vietnam and 70 percent in North Vietnam. Additionally, 29 northern provinces were under bomb attack, in which 12 provinces were outright destroyed, including 6 big cities like Hanoi and Haiphong. Four hundred industrial enterprises and the infrastructure system were seriously damaged (Nguyen 1990). Despite those difficulties, Vietnam’s Communist Party (VCP) attempted to strengthen the centrally planned system as a model for the whole country in general,3 and large-scale agricultural collectivization in particular (Fforde and de Vylder 1996; VCP 1977; White 1982). In North Vietnam, even since the 1974 Thai Binh Agricultural Conference,4
Along with the socialist transformation in the southern big cities, small-scale cooperatives were ordered to transform into large-scale and so-called “advanced” ones with support from the state, which invested in the mechanization and agricultural infrastructure systems. The size of the cooperatives was expanded from hamlets with dozens of households to entire villages with hundreds of households. In 1979, the average size of a cooperative in North Vietnam was 202 hectares of land, on which an average of 378 households lived and worked. In some cases, the advanced cooperatives included 2–3 villages with more than 1,000 hectares of land. Almost 97 percent of rural northern Vietnamese households belonged to 4,151 cooperatives (Do 1998). The cooperatives managed resource allocation decisions about production and distribution in accordance with the material targets of the State Planning Committee. As in most other socialist countries, cooperatives were also responsible for the provision of social services. The basis of production, however, was formed by brigades, who were responsible for directing fieldwork labor; cooperatives provided planned targets to the brigades, who then delivered the output to them. The system revolved around a detailed framework of labor categorization and norms that would formulate the required labor and other input needed to meet output targets, and calculate labor remuneration. Within cooperatives, peasants were still allowed to retain small personal plots amounting to no more than 5 percent of the total area of the cooperative. Some of the output of these plots, along with the surplus production of the cooperative, entered the heavily regulated public and private markets either at “negotiated prices” offered by state trading agencies or free market prices in the “unorganized” markets (Chu et al. 1992; Fforde and de Vylder 1996; Dat 1997).