Land to the Tiller (South Vietnam)
| Date | 26 March 1970 |
|---|---|
| Location | South Vietnam |
| Type | Land to the Tiller |
| Theme | Capitalist Land Reform |
| Budget | U.S.President Richard Nixon gave his support to new land reform measures in June 1969 in the Midway communiqué, judging it favourable to the Vietnamization of the conflict. In total, the United States financed $339 million of the total $441 million the reform cost. |
| Organised by | Nguyen Van Thieu & Roy Prosterman |
| Outcome | By the end of 1973, 953,000 land titles had been distributed to poor or landless farmers and 1,198,000 hectares of land—nearly 40 percent of cultivated land in South Vietnam—had been distributed. By the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the U.S. estimated that land tenancy had practically disappeared in South Vietnam and that the living standard of farmers had increased by 30 to 50 percent. |
Modern Land reform in Vietnam dates back to the political turmoil that followed World War II. A civil war pitted the communist Viet Minh (the predecessor of Viet Cong) against the French colonialists and their local supporters (mainly landowners). During that early stage, a large percentage of agricultural land was owned by powerful landowners and the majority of the rural population of Vietnam owned only small plots of land (with little legal assurance) or were simply landless peasants. The early success of the land reform program under the Viet Minh (and their successors, the Viet Cong), gave the communists a strong base of support among the 80% of the Vietnamese people who lived in rural areas. The support gained by the communists by the large section of rural dwellers, due to their newly obtained ability to have their own land, was an important factor in determining the public orientation, plot and outcome of the Vietnam War.
From 1954 to 1975 the land reform in Vietnam was pursued on two separate channels and regions as the country was provisionally divided into two parts: South Vietnam (The Republic of Vietnam) and North Vietnam (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam), resembling the current partition of Korea according to conflicting ideologies. Communist North Vietnam and its southern supporters, the Viet Cong, adopted a policy of confiscating the land of landlords and rich peasants by force and redistributing it to poor and landless peasants and hence organizing the rural population into collectives.
The Capitalist South Vietnam however failed in several land reform endeavors before finally achieving some success with a Land to the Tiller program in the early 1970s that was almost fully devised and supported by the United States. The conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam during 1975 and the unification of Vietnam ended the program. The land reform in South Vietnam nevertheless was instrumental to enhancing the success of the Vietnamese economy in the following years, although its role has been arguably underrated within scholarship and governmental narrative. A land reform program called Land to the Tiller was implemented in South Vietnam on March 26, 1970 by the president Nguyen Van Thieu, at the height of the Vietnam War. The reform intended to solve the problem of land tenancy by taking land from the landlords who are not laboring to the tenant farmers; the landlords are then compensated. Individual land holding was limited to 15 hectares. Legal title was extended to peasants in areas under control of the South Vietnamese government to whom land had previously been distributed by the Viet Cong.
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Wikipedia