Moral Economy and the Upper Peasant: The Dynamics of Land Privatization in the Mekong Delta

Abstract

This paper examines how people mobilize around notions of distributive justice, or 'moral economies', to make claims to resources, using the process of post-socialist land privatization in the Mekong Delta region of southern Vietnam as a case study. First, I argue that the region's history of settlement, production and political struggle helped to entrench certain normative beliefs around landownership, most notably in its population of semicommercial upper peasants. I then detail the ways in which these upper peasants mobilized around notions of distributive justice to successfully press demands for land restitution in the late 1980s, drawing on Vietnamese newspapers and other sources to construct case studies of local land conflicts. Finally, I argue that the successful mobilization of the upper peasants around such a moral economy has helped, over the past two decades, to facilitate the re-emergence of agrarian capitalism in the Mekong Delta, in contrast to other regions in Vietnam.

From Food Crisis to Agrarian Crisis? Food Security Strategy and Rural Livelihoods in Vietnam

“…as fewer and fewer households are involved in agriculture itself, even as the overall output and cultivated area increase), there occurs a concomitant process, also widely discussed in the field of agrarian studies, of concentration and accumulation, especially of land. Such a phenomenon has been widely observed in Vietnam over the past two decades, and has been especially pronounced in the Mekong Delta (Akram-Lodhi 2005;Prota and Beresford 2012;Gorman 2014).…”

“…While some of these households remain involved in agriculture as a sideline economic activity, many have sold all or part of their farmland to larger operators. As described elsewhere (Gorman 2014), this emerging class of capitalist farmers consists of local villagers who typically received larger plots during the process of post-socialist land privatization in the 1980s and 1990s, and who have been able, through further acquisitions, to amass farms ranging from 5 to 30 hectares. By utilizing economies of scale, these farmers are able to reap significant gains through intensive rice production, gains they have re-invested in the acquisition of more land and of machinery such as tractors and combine harvesters.…”

The Plantationocene: A Lusotropical Contribution to the Theory

“…Land enclosures were deemed necessary, once again, to creating a mobile wage labor force and efficient, large-scale agriculture. In the decades that followed, critical development scholars deployed Polanyi's ([1945] 2001) analysis of the socalled double movement to analyze the uneasy and uneven articulation of market society (whether capitalist, socialist, or in between) and rural communities (Stoler 1985;Verdery 2003;Chari 2005;Li 2007Li , 2014Gorman 2014;Wolford and Nehring 2015).…”

“Go Back To Where You Came From!”: Moral Economy of Land and the Politics of Belonging in Coastal Tanzania☆

“…In circumstances where few villagers hold title deeds and the state repudiates their customary claims, people tend to fall back, first and foremost, on moral arguments to defend their land rights and belonging. As many scholars have observed, the moral underpinnings of a given society become the most easily discernible in times of political economic crisis or when access to material resources becomes precarious (Curley 2019;Gorman 2014;Walsh-Dilley 2013;Wolford 2005). In Bagamoyo, the villagers' expressions of grievance coalesced around a customary norm governing land access, which I reference in this article with the shorthand, "moral economy of land."…”

“…In circumstances where few villagers hold title deeds and the state repudiates their customary claims, people tend to fall back, first and foremost, on moral arguments to defend their land rights and belonging. As many scholars have observed, the moral underpinnings of a given society become the most easily discernible in times of political economic crisis or when access to material resources becomes precarious (Curley 2019; Gorman 2014; Walsh‐Dilley 2013; Wolford 2005). In Bagamoyo, the villagers' expressions of grievance coalesced around a customary norm governing land access, which I reference in this article with the shorthand, “moral economy of land.” People were angry not only at the possibility and potential consequences of their dispossession but also what they perceived to be a violation of a moral principle of an agrarian economy: the notion that land belonged to those who cleared, occupied, and used it without interference for their daily provisioning, as much as it did to those who held formal titles but were absent from it.…”