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Reaping success: Farmers in the Plain of Reeds gather in one of their consecutive bumper rice crops. — VNA/VNS Photo Pham Do

Plain of Reeds celebrates a successful revolution

HCM CITY — When reunification arrived in 1975, the socialist revolution spread to Viet Nam’s southern half.

And in the Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta’s Dong Thap Muoi (Plain of Reeds), farmers enjoyed a revolution of their own.

Prior to that time, the farmers planted one rice crop a year, which had a life cycle of six months.

The low plains were flooded by the Mekong River, so the farmers grew floating rice, which rises and falls with the tide. But this only yielded two tonnes of paddy per ha.

In short, it was a low-yield, low-income backwater, with poor soil and few prospects.

Just 27 years on, it is now one of the delta’s chief rice baskets, part of the "rice belt" that also covers the Long Xuyen Quadrangle and Western Hau (Lower Mekong) River.

This belt produces over 17 million tonnes of paddy per year, about 40 per cent of total paddy production in Viet Nam.

What was this revolution, and how did it happen?

After 1975, the Government launched a programme to restructure rice cultivation in the delta.

Using high-yielding and shorter-cycled strains of rice, farmers were able to grow two crops of rice per year: the winter-spring and summer-autumn rice crops.

The winter crop yielded an average of five tonnes of paddy per ha, the summer crop four tonnes.

The winter-spring crop was a radical innovation for the locals – little wonder they called it "revolutionary rice".

When this rice crop was first introduced in 1979, farmers in the whole delta grew some 189,000ha, which is less than the winter-spring planting area of a single province nowadays.

Today, there are 1.7 million ha of this crop in the delta.

And, with modern cultivation techniques and application of fertilisers and pesticides, farmers have been able to boost production even when the winter crop cannot be sown.

In these poor soils, it’s still possible to harvest three tonnes of paddy per hectare from the old single-crop system.

Land reclamation has been another aspect of Dong Thap Muoi’s rapid evolution.

Over 700,000ha of waste land has become arable, allowing farmers of the three provinces in the Plain of Reeds to grow 530,000ha of winter-spring rice and 570,000ha of summer-autumn rice each year.

Following the footsteps of Dong Thap Muoi’s farmers, those in the Long Xuyen Quadrangle and the Western Lower Mekong Plains have turned 500,000ha of marshland into fertile soils propitious for growing two crops of short-cycled, high-yielding rice per annum.

There are still challenges ahead. Vietnamese rice is generally of low quality: about half of the country’s export rice is over 10 per cent broken, fetching a low price.

Even Viet Nam’s 5-10 per cent broken rice cannot command the same price as similar quality rice from Thailand.

The Government has thus set up an export rice producing zone, with one million ha of high-quality rice growing fields in several provinces lying by the Upper and Lower Mekong.

This zone will soon produce 8-10 million tonnes of paddy (or 4-5 million tonnes of rice) per year for export.

Meanwhile, efforts are underway to curb the dependence on rice. Seafood and fruit are becoming more and more important, and all three commodities must follow market demand.

Areas of low-yielding one-crop paddy must be converted into fish ponds and fruit orchards.

Anyone travelling to the Cuu Long Delta after a long absence cannot help but be struck by the visible evidence of transformation: the abundance of shrimp ponds and fruit orchards, where once only rice plant stems rustled in the breeze.

In 2005, the region is expected to harvest 1.7 million tonnes of seafood and earn US$1.5 billion in export revenue.

Fruit farming currently covers 350,000ha of delta land, and new zoning regulations will see this expand rapidly to 90,000ha, spreading from Long An and Tien Giang provinces to Kien Giang and Ca Mau.

Moreover, several processing factories will be built to process fruits for export.

It’s taken only a few decades to build upon and improve centuries of farming tradition.

But that’s how revolutions work, and there’s every indication that this one has been successful. — VNS