Viet Nam’s Food Security: A Castle of Cards in the Winds of Climate Change

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Since the 1980s, Viet Nam has achieved rapid economic growth and greatly increased food production and security. Those results are based, however, on a model of industrial agriculture that has inherent social and environmental limitations and increasingly faces the structural constraints of climate change. This article questions industrial agriculture, in general and through the case of Viet Nam, and its ability to sustain outputs and food security through the emerging crisis. It argues that while agroindustrial technologies and commodification are making the country particularly vulnerable to the imprecise and shifting context of a multifaceted crisis, the dominant response of the green economy, in Viet Nam as elsewhere, rests on unsubstantiated technological and institutional assumptions. Unchanged, such strategy will most likely lead to the collapse of Vietnamese agricultural production and a surge of food insecurity. In such a strategic vacuum, the article explores how agroecology offers a viable alternative, in parallel with the organization of production, distribution, and consumption through principles of food sovereignty.

Agricultural Modernization and Climate Change in Vietnam's Post‐Socialist Transition

“…As the emerging resistance of bankrupt and expropriated peasants may suggest, addressing the contradictions of modernization will not only imply various forms of agricultural de‐industrialization, but also rethinking the type of products being delivered, and the mode of distributing and accessing that surplus. This points towards an agro‐ecological model, with food sovereignty as its principle of social organization (Altieri, 2009; Rosset, 2011; for a longer discussion of this model for Vietnam see Fortier, 2011). In contrast to modern agriculture, agro‐ecology and food sovereignty can rebuild productive resilience and access capacity through diversified and localized species, short and robust commodity chains — commodity webs , in fact — that rely less on energy and infrastructure, have no agrochemical dependency, and can flexibly adapt to an as yet unknown pace and magnitude of climatic change.…”

Climate precarity in rural livelihoods: Agrarian transformations and smallholder vulnerability in Vietnam

“…Instead of paying attention to structural barriers to change and pre‐existing social vulnerabilities, policies to adapt to climate change in Vietnam have tended to follow faith in technology and ecological modernization. A focus on ‘climate‐smart agriculture’ or investments in improved seeds that are climate resilient has been a common proposed solution (Fortier, 2013). This is a trend noted elsewhere, as some governments and international donors have asserted that climate adaptation should focus on more export‐oriented growth through intensified production, increases in inputs or labour or expanded global markets (Fortier & Tran, 2013; Paprocki, 2018; Taylor, 2018), which are the very processes that have increased climate precarity for many.…”

Lost in authoritarian development: Have global climate deals and the aid community sacrificed the Vietnamese highland population?

“…For instance, both survey and interviews showed that in these areas only the original highland people speak affectionately of forest spaces, wilderness and diversity, which indicates indigenous people's potential for forest stewardship. Thus, the government's agricultural monocropping regime is mostly uncontested at the local level, though criticised by both domestic and international observers as being unsustainable (Fortier, 2013;Ortmann, 2017). Thus, global discourses on climate change are silently turned into support for ethnic assimilation and technocratic state planning, and essentially become a tool of authoritarianism.…”