Rice cultivation in southern Vietnam, 1880-1954

Jean-Pascal Bassino (1)

1 CRISES - Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires en Sciences humaines et Sociales de Montpellier

The conventional interpretation of Asia's agricultural transformationduring the 20th century is that land productivity and land/labor ratios,which were both initially comparatively low, increased as a result oftechnological change. Data available for a number of Asian countrieshave usually been interpreted as showing as a land-replacing pathdescribed as the 'Ishikawa-curve' (Ishikawa 1981). However, as Van der Eng (2004) has shown, Ishikawa's interpretation is biased towards EastAsia, providing an adequate description of the experience of Japan,Taiwan, and Korea but not of the mainland Southeast Asian countries.He produces evidence that the land/labor ratio was much lower inJapan than in Mainland Southeast Asia.The purpose of this paper is to investigate the yield series implied bylate 19th century official sources and by micro-data collected by theFrench colonial administration, and to propose a re-evaluation of paddyoutput. The results show that, in southern Vietnam, initial conditionswere not only characterized by high land/labor ratios but also bycomparatively high land productivity, and therefore high level of laborproductivity. It appears, therefore, that the path of southern Vietnam's transformation of rice cultivation differs markedly from the receivedwisdom expressed by the 'Ishikawa-curve'.

Domaines: Histoire

Jean-Pascal Bassino. Rice cultivation in southern Vietnam, 1880-1954: a reevaluation of land productivity in Asian perspective. Keizai shirin, 2006, 73 (4), pp.3-38. ⟨hal-03061171⟩