Abstract
Agriculture in the Mekong Delta was developed to some extent in the first half of the twentieth century during French colonial period. In the latter half, however, the Mekong Delta became a battlefield of the civil war and international conflict caused by the interferences of the super powers, and the Vietnamese people had no chance to develop the potential of the land. It was just after the unification of Vietnam that a big irrigation project was undertaken under the unified political power. Then, the Doi Moi policy in agriculture since 1988 and the introduction of the market economy promoted dramatic change in agriculture. Surveying the development of agriculture in the Mekong Delta, the last decade of the twentieth century can be regarded as the second peak of development since the “mise en valeur” period of the early twentieth century.
In Japan, the first comprehensive research on agriculture and rural society in the Mekong Delta was done by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and other scholars in the early 1970s. Many articles and research reports on geography, hydology, and rice agriculture in the Delta were published in the Center' s journal Tonan Ajia Kenkyu [Southeas Atsian Studies]. The research done during the Vietnam War and the various papers based on them, with appreaches from the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, aimed to comprehensively study rice agricultural society in the Mekong Delta. Hewever, as in the case studies in rural societies by Americans in the 1960s, those studies were discontinued after the end of the Vietnam War.
The articles published here represent the small, but important results of the first joint research done in the Mekong Delta since research was discontinued until 1980s. In 1990s, the Vietnamese government began to accept agricultural research teams from foreign countries. We formed a research team, whose members consisted of historians, agronomists, sociologists, and geographers from Japan, Vietnam, and France, with a research grant from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, government of Japan (History of Agriculture in the Mekong Delta, team leader, Takada Yoko, Keiai University, 1995-97). We also published Mekong Report, Nos. 1-6 containing articles, research summaries, field notes, and lists of data collected during the research.
The aim of the research was to uncover the diversity in agricultural societies in the Mekong Delta. The diversity stems from the geographical characteristics classified by Nguyen Huu Chiem 1) of Cantho University. We tried to make clear that rural society in the Delta, superficially monolithic, consists of several regions with different historical backgrounds. Then, research members with different disciplines like history, agronomy, sociology, and geography, selected geographically typical villages in the Delta for the research, and studied their agricultural histories and social develpment according to the member's own interest.
The villages selected are 1) a village that stands at the mouth of the Hau River in a coastal complex composed of lowland of brackish soil and sand ridges (going), lagoons and mangroves; 2) a village in the central Delta where the Tien River is split into several streams and affected by tides, where the flood spreads slowly ; 3) a village in a broad depression floodplain on the right side of the Hau River in the western Delta; and 4) a village on the frontier in an inundated area at the edge of the Delta with acid sulfate soil.
These four typologies do not cover the full diversity of agricultural develepment in the Mekong Delta. However, those four represent unique characteristics of locality, different from land forms, and also have the common feature of agricultural processes. The authors chose crucial factors to study land-use development and rural society in the Mekong Delta in the twentieth century. ...
