transforming the ``model'' approach to upland rural development in vietnam

Agriculture and Human Values 18: 403–412, 2001.© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

IN THE FIELD

Transforming the “model” approach to upland rural development in Vietnam

Joe PetersFaculty of Environmental Sciences, Hanoi University of Science, Vietnam National University, and Natural Resources Management,Grand Valley State University, USA

Accepted in revised form July 8, 2000

Abstract. Three quarters of Vietnam’s land area is in the uplands and foothills, which contain some of the poorestcommunes in the country. The Ngoc Lac Natural Resources Conservation and Management Project, in ThanhHoa Province, is one of several large upland rural development projects that receives substantial funding fromforeign governments in Vietnam. The project was designed in 1995 to address the environmental constraints tosocio-economic development of Ngoc Lac District, while improving agricultural production and natural resourcesmanagement. During the first three years of operation, the project focused on the introduction and disseminationof various “model” technological packages for improved agriculture, forestry, and animal husbandry. Thesemodels included tree nurseries, sloping agricultural land technologies, integrated fish pond-livestock pen-homegarden systems, and several animal husbandry activities. However, the distribution of the models was not sociallyequitable, the sustainability of the models by model farming households proved problematic, and the adoption ofthese technology practices by non-model households was quite low. Four lessons can be identified from past ruraldevelopment experience: beware of “participatory” rural appraisal, start small and go slowly, introduce limitedtechnologies, and help farmers adapt the technologies. There are two promising initiatives underway in Vietnam.These are the participatory curriculum development and the participatory technology development initiatives ofthe Social Forestry Support Program.

Key words: Agricultural technology, Forestry, Participation, Rural development, Uplands, Vietnam

Abbreviations: NGO – Non-Governmental Organization; ODA – Official Development Assistance; PRA –Participatory Rural Appraisal; PTD – Participatory Technology Development; SALT – Sloping Agricultural LandTechnology; TOT – Transfer of Technology; VAC – Vuon-Ao-Chuong (Vietnamese acronym for garden, fish pondand livestock pen)

Joe Peters is currently United States Fulbright Senior Scholar with the Faculty of Environmental Sciences,Hanoi University of Science, Vietnam National University. His work in Vietnam involves conservation awareness,forestry education, rural development, and farmer participatory research. He holds a PhD in forestry from NorthCarolina State University, and is also adjunct assistant professor of natural resources management at GrandValley State University.

Introduction

For many, Vietnam continues to conjure up ghostsof a war that ended a quarter of a century ago.But the Vietnamese have put the past behind themand are focused clearly on the present task oftransforming their once sluggish rural economy intoanother Asian miracle. Indeed, the nation has madeamazing strides in agricultural productivity in thepast 15 years following the 1986 introduction of thedoi moi renovation program that initiated a trans-ition from central planning to a market economy. In1989, Vietnam achieved national food security andsince 1996 it has become the world’s second leading

exporter of rice (UNDP, 2000). However, despitethe current national-level production of food surplus,food insecurity remains a major problem amongstthe rural poor. Nowhere is this more evident thanin the uplands and foothills, largely inhabited by thenation’s diverse ethnic minorities. It is estimated that85% of these areas, which constitute three quartersof Vietnam’s land area, are very poorly developed,with poor infrastructure and health care, relatively lowlevels of literacy and education, and scant informationon improved agricultural technologies (Morrison andDubois, 1998).

A concomitant problem in the uplands is thecontinuing loss of forest cover due to logging and

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clearing of land for agriculture, which by 1993 hadresulted in 12.5 million hectares of denuded hills andopen wasteland, 38% of the national territory (Hoang,1995).

Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister, Nguyen CongTan, recently argued that poverty alleviation is a goodway to minimize this deforestation (Anon., 1999), andin Vietnam, rural development appears to be a centralstrategy of poverty reduction. At a Consultative Groupmeeting in Paris in 1998, there was considerable agree-ment between the Government of Vietnam and donorson the priority of rural development. Thus, by the endof 1999, there were 453 ongoing and 87 pipeline offi-cial development assistance (ODA) projects in the areaof rural development with a total financial commitmentof over US$4 billion (UNDP, 2000).

This paper provides an analysis of one such ruraldevelopment project in the uplands of Vietnam, basedon the author’s numerous interviews with projectstaff, local officials, and farmers while serving asproject advisor between April and June 1999, and areview of relevant project documentation and otherliterature. It begins with a discussion of the projectsite, followed by a description of some of the intro-duced “models,” and then highlights some of the majorproblems encountered during the first three years ofoperation. The following sections discuss the lessonsof past rural development endeavors, and attempt toexplain why these lessons were overlooked. The restof the paper is a brief discussion of some promisinginitiatives currently underway in Vietnam.

The Ngoc Lac natural resource management andconservation project

Amidst the concern for people and the environment,and the massive influx of ODA to the rural develop-ment sector in Vietnam, a concept paper for the NgocLac Natural Resource Management and ConservationProject was submitted to CARE/Norway by CAREInternational in Vietnam in June 1995. Implementa-tion of the US$1.4 million project began in January1996 with funding from the Norwegian DevelopmentAgency, NORAD. According to the project’s finalevaluation report (van de Langenberg et al., 1999: 4),the Ngoc Lac Project was

designed to address environmental constraints(including soil erosion caused by deforestation)of rural development, while increasing and diver-sifying production through improved access totechnical knowledge and management of naturalresources. The final goal is to provide approxi-mately 17,000 people in four communes of Ngoc

Lac District with the skills and resources to enablethem to significantly improve the quality of theirenvironment and their standard of living.

Ngoc Lac is an administrative district within ThanhHoa Province, situated in the foothills and uplandsof north central Vietnam. The district’s popula-tion of roughly 122,000 is predominantly ethnicMuong (69%), but with a significant Kinh, or Viet,minority (28%), the dominant ethnic group nation-wide. According to Dang et al. (1993), the Muongare descendants of a pre Viet-Muong communityfrom which they split off to form a separate ethnicgroup around the first centuries of our era, and theyshare a language (Viet-Muong) very similar to thatof Kinh. While the present day Kinh moved to thecoastal plains and came under the influence of Chineseculture, the ancient Muong remained in the moun-tains and developed relatively independently. Theyexerted a certain influence on the Thai ethnic group,from which they borrowed various elements. Thus,the Muong are close to the Kinh in origin, but closerto the Thai from a social and cultural point of view.Nevertheless, although there are some distinct differ-ences, Muong family organization in Ngoc Lac largelyresembles kinship patterns of the larger Vietnamesesociety dominated by the Kinh majority ethnic group(Esser, 1998).

All of the district’s 20 communes, including thefour project communes, are considered poor (van deLangenberg et al., 1999). Only 3% of the district’s47,655 ha retains natural forest cover (CARE, 1995a).The predominant agricultural activity in the districtamongst both Kinh and Muong is irrigated rice produc-tion, while communes with close access to roads alsocultivate sugar cane under contract with the nearbyLam Son sugar mill. Since the 1960s, when theNorth needed bamboo for its war effort (P. Woods,personal communication), luong bamboo (Dendrocal-amus membranaceus Munro) has been cultivated onlower slopes as a cash crop (Le, 1999). Such uplandforest crops, along with plantations of fruit trees andmedicinal plants, are considered a traditional aspectof Muong land management. Horticulture is, however,unusual or at most occupies only a small area of landclose to the house reserved for this purpose (Dang etal., 1993). Like the Kinh, the Muong in Ngoc Lactraditionally raise chickens, pigs, and other domesticanimals for market sale (Esser, 1998).

During the pre-project phase from October toDecember 1995, participatory rural appraisal (PRA)activities were undertaken in the four projectcommunes over a three-week period to collect environ-mental and socio-economic data and inform localpopulations about the project. The PRA report states

TRANSFORMING THE “MODEL” APPROACH TO UPLAND RURAL DEVELOPMENT IN VIETNAM 405

that these data were then to be used “to determinethe priorities of the project, design specific projectactivities and village planning activities throughoutthe 6-month establishment phase of the project”(CARE, 1995a: 2). Although the PRA methodologyis not explicitly described in the report, most of thecomments and concerns generated by the PRA aregrouped under headings related to:

− literacy− water supply and irrigation− access to savings and credit− agricultural production (mostly rice and sugar

cane)− home garden systems including fish ponds and

animal husbandry− natural and planted forest (mostly bamboo).

What went wrong

A review of the PRA and subsequent project docu-ments reveals that the project committed somemistakes from the very beginning, quite probablycompounding errors later in the project. What isrevealed most clearly is the lack of any clear sense ofthe nature of participatory rural development, and theneed for equitable, and sustainable, provision of skillsand resources.

The PRA problem

The PRA reports inconsistently on community organi-zation in the four communes, and scarcely mentionsethnicity except to say that the majority of people inthe four communes are of Muong ethnicity. There iseven less attention to gender issues in the PRA, asrevealed by a later gender assessment report (Esser,1998: 35):

Reports and documentation prepared during earlystages of the Ngoc Lac project were resoundinglysilent on gender issues. The project concept paperwas written without mention of women or of genderas an issue. The preliminary PRA managed tocompletely overlook the gender variable, providingno gender-sensitive or gender-disaggregated data.

The PRA report likewise does not present wealthranking data, though presumably these were gatheredat some time during the early stages of the project.A separate report, compiled nearly three years afterthe PRA, cautions that the project had placed toomuch emphasis on the reliability and comparability ofthe wealth ranking data collected during early projectstages (Esser, 1998).

Moreover, the three-week PRA gathered onlylimited data in pre-determined categories that reflectedthe a priori strategy laid out in the project design docu-ment (CARE, 1995b). It is as if minds were alreadymade up with regard to what types of interventionswould be developed in the implementation. Notablyabsent from the 29-page PRA report are comments andvillager concerns about upland production systems, amajor focus of later project implementation.

The “model” mistake

With the exception of literacy, which was notaddressed at all by the subsequent project, most ofthe project-supported interventions were grouped intoone of the PRA categories. During the first three yearsof implementation of the Ngoc Lac Project, specificprogram components became known as “models.” Inproject documentation, this term is used both to referto (1) a certain technological package, and (2) theindividual farming household implementing the tech-nological package. Since the project embarked on avery broad spectrum of activities, these models weresimilarly varied and extensive. Table 1 provides anumber of characteristics of these models.

The models, however, whether in agriculture,forestry, or animal husbandry invariably ran intotrouble in terms of sustainability and social equity. Theproject adopted a highly subsidized approach to intro-duction of the models, with little coherent thought as tohow activities could become self-sustaining followingthe end of direct project support.

A brief discussion of the Sloping AgriculturalLand Technology, or SALT, model is illustrative ofthe trouble with the models. SALT was originallydeveloped in the Philippines, aimed at sustainableproduction on hillsides susceptible to soil erosionthrough the introduction of hedgerows grown on thecontour (Watson and Laquihon, undated). At NgocLac, model households were provided with a shorttraining and given seeds of a variety of leguminousspecies, forest and fruit trees, and maize to plant onthe contours. However, project communities placed arelatively low importance on the models, citing highdemand for labor and time as reasons for the unpopu-larity. According to the project’s own figures, only43% of the models were correctly applied, since manyfarmers attempted to establish the models on theirrelatively flat home garden land (Picard, 1998). In afollow-up survey of the ten SALT models that persistedthe longest out of the original 25 set up in 1996–1997, only half still had hedgerows in evidence by1999 (Woods, 1999a). Furthermore, only three hadexpanded the technology on their own land, and only

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Table 1. Description of some “models” introduced in the Ngoc Lac Natural Resource Management andConservation Project, Vietnam.

Model Number of models Project inputsa Model obligations

VACb 31 Some training; 2.5 million 50% repayment after two

VND credit years

SALTc 25 Some training; seeds of None

leguminous species

Tree nurseriesd 34 (incl. 8 fruit) Up to 2 million VND Project commitment to

in cash & materials purchase all seedlings

at market value for resale

to villagers at 10–20% of

market value

Animal husbandrye 80 sow & boar; 201 All animals In-kind repayment for

chick & cock distribution to other villagers

aThroughout the first three years of operation (1996–1999), the Vietnamese dong (VND) varied betweenapproximately 11,000–13,000/US$1.00.bVAC is the Vietnamese acronym for vuon-ao-chuong, an integrated production system consisting of homegardens, fish ponds and livestock pens.cSALT is the English acronym for Sloping Agricultural Land Technology, a system originally developedin the Philippines, aimed at sustainable production on hillsides susceptible to soil erosion, through theintroduction of hedgerows grown on the contour.dModel tree nurseries initially produced mainly forest tree species and bamboo; later, some began to producefruit tree species as well.eThese models included distribution of Mong Cai sows and boars, and Tam Hoang cocks and semi-industrialchicks.

one led to any spontaneous adoption by neighboringhouseholds.

Not only did the project not create any “roadmapsto sustainability” (Fritzen, 1998: 45), but also theselection of households to receive the models revealedwidespread social inequities. Most model householdsvisited during the mid-term evaluation were eitherchiefs of the project-established village developmentboards, or their close relatives. Fritzen (1998: 39)noted in the mid-term evaluation that the project wasprone to the “development law of gravity,” which hedescribed as follows:

. . . the fruits of the project flow disproportionatelyupwards, to the better-off; or stated less strongly,project benefits are not concentrated on the poor.Distribution of production models is one example.The project made a decision early on that most ofthese should go to the better off, so as to be moresuccessful; this only exacerbated the bias in any casetowards distribution of benefits to influential villa-gers and their families, which is definitely takingplace.

Lessons from the past

In light of the global experience with rural devel-opment, it is apparent that the Ngoc Lac projectoverlooked a number of lessons learned over the pasttwenty years with regards to social equity and sustain-ability. Bunch (1982), Chambers (1983), Chamberset al. (1989), and Whyte (1991) cover many of theselessons in detail in their seminal works on these topics.

Beware of “participatory” rural appraisal

Throughout Vietnam, projects such as the one at NgocLac are designed on the basis of participatory ruralappraisal (PRA), but this approach should not be seenas a panacea for sound and equitable project design.Shanks and Bui (2000) explore what they call a crit-ical turning point between an “event” and a “process”and repeat the call of two other authors writing on thesubject in 1993 (Farrington and Bebbington cited inShanks and Bui, 2000: 4):

While the literature on new methods for promotingfarmer participation has burgeoned over the lastdecade, we lag far behind in understanding howparticipation can be institutionalized. As long as


these institutional questions remain unresolved,participation will continue to be an event ratherthan a process, and the prospects for constructingan agricultural development that is more equitable,democratic and appropriate for the rural poor willremain unfulfilled.

At Ngoc Lac, PRA proved to be an event, not aprocess. Although the project did help to set up villageand commune development boards to coordinate thelogistical requirements for implementation of themodels, these synthetic institutions later proved tobe part of the problem. Not only were these artifi-cial social structures unsustainable beyond the life ofthe project, but also they tended to be captured bylocal elite. Some years ago, however, experiencedrural development practitioners like Bunch (1982) hadalready suggested working with existing social organi-zations, helping to build their capacity to deal with newinnovations and opportunities.

Start small, go slowly

Faulty project design and strategy may well have beenthe source of many of the problems encountered laterduring project implementation. One of the first lessonsof rural development is to start small and go slowly.But the Ngoc Lac project started big and went quickly.During the first six months of operation the projectset to work in all 40 villages in the four communes,and even reached all 3,200 households with a one-timefree distribution of improved rice seed. However, inlight of the fact that the project had chosen the districtextension department with only two staff at the timeas the main implementing agency, simultaneous start-up in so many villages overwhelmed the capacity ofthe project and district staff to work effectively in anyone locale. Organizations with hard-won rural devel-opment experience, like World Neighbors, suggest thatthe most successful programs begin with a first-yearbudget (excluding vehicles and other one-time equip-ment purchases) of between US$3,000 and US$20,000(Bunch, 1982). While this size may sound ridiculouslysmall, the idea is not to remain small forever, but firstto gain trust and confidence among local populationsand experience working together, before scaling upgeographically and demographically.

Introduce limited technologies

While the “shotgun” approach to agricultural tech-nology transfer and natural resource managementpursued by the designers and implementers of theNgoc Lac project may appeal to those eager to do asmuch as possible, experience shows that rural devel-

opment is better served by using limited technologies(Bunch, 1982):

The issue is much more complex than just whetheror not we should throw out vast quantities of infor-mation. It takes us back to our original goals. Isthere any point in the farmers knowing about aninnovation if they do not put it into practice? Isthere any value in their putting it into practice onlyto abandon it the following year? Are they to besimply passive receivers of information, or are theyto participate in the process – to help find andadapt technology and teach it to others? And are wereinforcing community solidarity and social justice,or destroying them?

If programs are to start small and go slowly,they must use limited technologies. As Bunch (1982)explains, a limited technology changes only one ortwo practices in the present farming system, andrarely involves a new crop or breed of animal.Moreover, Bunch (1982) discusses numerous reasonswhy programs should limit the technology they teach,including the need to achieve a high rate of success,assure input availability, achieve more social justiceand develop local leadership. By trying to addresseverything at once, and by adding one innovation afteranother, the project’s training and extension effortswere diluted to the point that instead of success, themodels experienced a high rate of failure. By heavilysubsidizing necessary inputs, the project underminedthe potential for private entrepreneurs to provide futureinputs to area farmers. By working with a few wealthyand influential model farmers on a variety of innova-tions, the project engendered perceptions of nepotismand gender bias, instead of building confidence andnurturing leadership.

Help farmers adapt the technologies

Detailed and patient investigation of farming systemsand rural development over the past two decades hascalled into question the once predominant mode ofagricultural extension known as transfer of technology(TOT) (Chambers et al., 1989). Such studies haveshown overwhelmingly that farmers do not adopt tech-nologies, wholesale, as much as they adapt technolo-gies to fit their agro-ecological and socio-economicconditions. In a recent study of four agricultural devel-opment projects, including two in Vietnam, IIRR(1999: 44) discovered that

Due to diverse bio-physical and socio-economicenvironments, few recommended technologies wereactually appropriate to all farms. Thus, farmerstended to try a new technology first to understand

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how it works in relation to their economic, ecolo-gical, technical and social needs. Farmers studiedthe basic characteristics of a technology throughexploratory and comparative trials. Finally, farmersdetermined the actual usefulness and effectivenessof technologies under their farm conditions throughverification trials.

In light of such realization, it is not surprising thatthe TOT approach taken at Ngoc Lac resulted in lowadoption of introduced models, even among modelhouseholds, and virtually no spontaneous adoption byneighbors.

The IIRR (1999) study found that farmers aremore likely to use multi-purpose technologies thateffectively solved farming problems, for a variety ofeconomic, ecological, technical, and social reasons.However, it is important to note that in all study sites,the most important motivator for continued use of atechnology was the income factor. This insight couldhelp to explain the high incidence of discontinued useof the SALT model at Ngoc Lac; not only does it havea high labor demand, but the economic returns on thatlabor are likely less than other alternatives.

Why the lessons were overlooked

In cases like the Ngoc Lac project, the Vietnameseproject managers and technicians employed had little,if any, experience in fostering and directing partici-patory development. Moreover, many if not most ofthese individuals had little access to the massive ruraldevelopment literature in English and other foreignlanguages, let alone in Vietnamese, that might havehelped them avert their mistakes. Therefore, withoutclose, on-site supervision by professionals who didhave the benefit of such experience and exposure, thereis little wonder why this project promoted inappro-priate models and fell into the more familiar top-downdelivery of benefits and transfer of package technolo-gies. But beyond this basic lack of experience andliterature, why did the Ngoc Lac project personnelsuccumb to the seductive appeal of the model approachto rural development?

Participation lip-service

The participatory approaches to rural development areonly as good as their implementation, and should notbe employed merely to satisfy donor concerns aboutgrassroots participation. In Vietnam, there are manyexamples of the failure of rural development practi-tioners to appreciate the value of farmer’s knowledgeand participation, especially women and minorities,some of which are described in Esser (1998), Morrisonand Dubois (1998), and Rambo et al. (1995). At Ngoc

Lac, Esser (1998) maintains that project shortcom-ings in terms of gender equity and effectiveness mayhave been due in part to failure to consider men’sand women’s different farming knowledge and prior-ities. This failure to consider differential knowledge inturn may have been a result of the failure of the PRAto seriously consider the gender issue, which in turnmay have resulted from deep-seated gender bias. Alocal saying in Ngoc Lac – “the grass cannot be tallerthan the rice” – is used to justify men’s and women’sdifferential access to power (Esser, 1998).

In another example, the Ngoc Lac project nurseryand afforestation activities focused on a mixture ofnative and exotic tree species. However, projectdesigners and implementers completely overlookedthe most obvious tree species in local upland systems,xuan (Melia azedarach Linn.), despite the fact thatthe use of this species in indigenous fallow manage-ment has been documented (Le and Tran, 1997).Such oversight may be partially explained by Rambo(1995a):

The tendency to devalue indigenous knowledge mayreflect in part the fact that ethnocentrism is at leastas prevalent among the Kinh as it is among membersof majority cultures everywhere in the world. But,probably much more important is the fact thatthis natural tendency of members of the majoritygroup to devalue minority cultures is reinforced,in the Vietnamese case, by the Marxist model ofunilineal cultural evolution, which assigns most ofthe minority groups of the highlands to a primi-tive or backward status in contrast to the putativelycivilized society of the lowlands.

That stated, there does not appear to have beena strong ethnic bias at work in project implementa-tion, favoring Kinh households to the detriment ofthe Muong. While most policy-makers and cadresnationwide are of Kinh origin (Rambo, 1995b), it issignificant to note that a fair number of leaders andproject staff at Ngoc Lac in mid-1999, including thePresident of the District People’s Committee and thedistrict project coordinator, were in fact ethnic Muong.The Muong of Ngoc Lac seem to be rather assimi-lated into mainstream Kinh culture, and the Muong ingeneral display relatively high levels of school attend-ance among both boys and girls, resulting in higherlevels of adult literacy than many other ethnic minor-ities (Rambo, 1995a). If indeed “many Kinh cadresevaluate the development potential of the minorities interms of the extent to which they conform to specifi-cally Kinh cultural beliefs and practices,” as Rambo(1995b: 26) claims, it is likely that the developmentpotential of the Muong is ranked quite high. Neverthe-less, the ethnicity issue has not been well studied at


Ngoc Lac, and only the gender assessment report byEsser (1998) generated any original insights into thiscomplex variable. It is likely that an urban bias againstrural peoples, like that described by Chambers (1983),was stronger among Ngoc Lac project personnel hiredfrom Hanoi than was an ethnic bias.

Big, fast donor-driven development

There may be an unspoken reason why World Neigh-bors prefers to start small and go slowly; small moneybrings out the best in people, and big money brings outthe worst in people. In a country like Vietnam wherethe policies, institutions, and technologies needed tosupport rural development are undergoing significantchange, the capacity at all levels to handle large,complex projects with multi-million dollar budgets islimited. At best, this massive influx of ODA is ineffi-cient because it exceeds local capacities; at worst it isirresponsible because it leads to corruption and otherabuses.

Ngoc Lac project personnel were handed a mandateto start big and go quickly, despite the lessons of thepast, perhaps because the project designers, the donor,and the executing agency – CARE – all overestimatedthe managerial abilities of the Vietnamese personnel.But this does not answer questions about why theproject was designed to start big and go quickly. Thiswas likely a result of donor-driven development, wherethe organization with the funds established the para-meters. Many donor agencies do not like to fund whatthey perceive to be research, and so inadequate time isallotted to projects to experiment with farmers, learntogether, and gain their trust and confidence; in short,to start small and go slowly.

Unlimited inappropriate technologies

Not surprisingly, the technology and extension modelsthat were introduced in the Ngoc Lac project werethose in vogue elsewhere in Vietnam and the region.The Vietnam-Sweden Mountain Rural DevelopmentProgramme (Gibbon and Nguyen, 1999; Bui, 2000),Action Aid Vietnam (Duong and Pham, 2000), andCooperation Internationale pour le Developpement etla Solidarité (Woods, 1999b) all implemented projectsin northern Vietnam that promoted SALT and othermodels also introduced by CARE in Ngoc Lac. In anapparent case of the blind leading the blind, projectafter project attempted to promote a SALT model thathad long ago fallen into disfavor among farmers in itsnative Philippines (Garrity, 1999).

The reason for this blind application of numerous,arguably inappropriate, technologies appears to be thelack of any systematic assessment of farming systemsand the constraints to production. Such an approach

would have resulted in the identification and prior-itization of key bottlenecks in the local cultivationsystems, and an experimental step-by-step investiga-tion of technological options. But again this does notanswer questions about why farming systems researchand household economic studies were not part andparcel of the rural development enterprise at NgocLac. However, it is likely that the lack of preparationand experience of project personnel, combined withdonor-driven priorities to deliver results, led to theproject’s lack of focus and introduction of too manyquestionable technologies.

Non-adapted institutions

Vietnam is presently in the midst of a fundamentaltransformation of bureaucratic and economic struc-tures. After reunification of the country in 1975, untilthe late 1980s, Vietnamese agricultural policy focusedon expanding collectivized agriculture to the newlyliberated South (Christoplos, 1995). The introductionof the doi moi reforms of the late 1980s was in partrecognition of the failure of the agricultural collec-tives and cooperatives, which by now have all butdisappeared.

These dynamic changes have many implicationsfor the way that rural development is to proceed inVietnam. Christoplos (1995: 14) makes the followingobservations:

In the past all government agricultural serviceefforts were channeled through cooperatives andcollectives. A huge bureaucratic structure existedto provide physical inputs, credit, marketing facil-ities and technological information to the cooper-atives and collectives. This structure is now beingredirected and dismantled. The vast majority ofagricultural services staff have been dismissed.

In light of this institutional vacuum in many ruralareas, it is not surprising that the Ngoc Lac Projectencountered difficulties with district-level extensionstaffing, capacities, and attitudes. Until 1993, when thecentral government directed each province to estab-lish its own extension service, extension was notconsidered necessary. The government previously “feltthat technological change should be managed throughcentral directives sent to technicians and managersat the cooperatives, rather than through support tofarmer decision-making” (Christoplos, 1995: 15). It isquite evident that the top-down, transfer of technologylegacy of the state-run economy did not prepare NgocLac project personnel to help farmers adapt introducedtechnologies to local conditions.

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Directions for the future

It could be argued that the donors and executing agen-cies, many of them international non-governmentalorganizations (NGOs) like CARE, have a certainresponsibility to help ensure the success of the projectsthey fund and administer. The time is always ripe fordonors in particular to re-evaluate the way projectsare designed, funded, and implemented according tothe project cycle. Since sustainable and equitable ruraldevelopment has proven to be a long process in anydeveloping country, there is little reason to believethat the process can be short-circuited in Vietnam.With a combined ODA of nearly US$6 billion goingcurrently to support rural development and environ-mental projects in Vietnam (UNDP, 1999, 2000), thegovernment, the donors, and executing agencies havean imperative to improve their collective performance.This may mean greater attention to investments andactivities at both the macro- and micro-levels of ruraldevelopment.

The macro level

One promising macro-level initiative designed to raisethe long-term capacity of the country’s rural develop-ment cadres is the Social Forestry Support Programfunded by the Swiss government. An exciting aspectof this program is a participatory curriculum devel-opment process in forestry education and trainingunderway in five universities scattered throughout thecountry. Through a process of stakeholder analysisand interaction involving all groups and individualswith an interest in forestry education, providersof forestry education are developing curricula thatrespond to the changing circumstances in the field(Taylor, 1999). The new curricula include Introductionto Social Forestry, Social Forestry Project Manage-ment, Agroforestry, and Forestry Extension, all timelydirections and additions to the rural developmentcapacity-building process. The idea behind this newwave in forestry education is to imbue social prin-ciples and processes into what was until very recently ahighly technical field. Topics previously uncovered inthe nation’s forestry curricula are now included, suchas indigenous knowledge and gender assessment. Asystematic approach to project management, monitor-ing, and evaluation is also being introduced, as areparticipatory approaches to extension and technologydevelopment.

The micro level

There is also a growing awareness of the need towork together with farmers in developing appropriateagriculture and forestry technologies in Vietnam. One

such initiative is a participatory technology devel-opment (PTD) process also underway within theSocial Forestry Support Program. In this initiative,researchers from the working partner university insti-tutions of the program were brought together withextension staff from various levels of the Thai NguyenProvince extension service along with local villagersto plan concrete agricultural experiments. Later, thevillagers in close collaboration with the extension staffand university researchers will implement these exper-iments on their own land (Scheuermeier and Katz,1999). Experiments such as this in PTD, which havebeen repeated now in the Central Highlands as well,are likely to yield valuable modes of working withfarmers to facilitate their analysis, selection, experi-mentation, and adaptation of agricultural technologies.The PTD process can help project staff recognizethat farmers treat “technology packages” as a “tech-nology basket” from which to choose specific compo-nents (IIRR, 1999). Moreover, the PTD process mayhelp project/extension staff to recognize and promotefarmer invention or creation of new technologies as away to harness farmer knowledge and foster farmerself-reliance.

Conclusions

It is critical to recall that the final goal of the NgocLac Project and other rural development projects likeit is to help rural people help themselves “to signifi-cantly improve the quality of their environment andtheir standard of living.” In the dynamic setting of ruralVietnam, this requires recognition that farmers haveonly recently begun to produce for a free and ever-changing market, in which there are no silver bulletsand one-time fixes that will last forever. Projectsthat have taken this silver bullet, albeit fired froma shotgun, model-oriented approach are numerousand have led to disastrous results. As Roland Bunchsuccinctly pointed out in an email message to CAREstaff about Ngoc Lac:

. . . we have ample evidence that what is sustain-able in agricultural development is not any giventechnology (even the best has a half-life of about 6years, at most), but rather innovativeness. Innova-tiveness is what lasts, and what makes agriculture aprofitable business in the long term . . .

Projects can help innovativeness by fosteringpartnerships at the local level between farmers, exten-sion workers, researchers, private entrepreneurs, massorganizations, and government officials. These arethe individuals and groups that will still be living


and working in Ngoc Lac and other locales when theproject money runs out and project staff are gone.

As one Ngoc Lac Project agricultural consultantconcluded (Zeiss, 1999: 8): “Ultimately, the Projectmust be judged a failure unless Project-initiated activ-ities continue to flourish long after the Project fundingends.”

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank in particular Dr. Mary Picardfor bringing me into the Ngoc Lac Project as projectadvisor from April to June, 1999. I would also liketo thank the project staff and villagers in Ngoc LacDistrict. My thanks to Dr. Dai Peters, Mr. PaulWoods, Dr. Michael Zeiss, Mr. Ken MacLean, and ananonymous reviewer for their constructive criticismsof earlier drafts of this article. I gratefully acknowl-edge CARE International in Vietnam for its assistance.Thanks to Dr. John Le Van, an earlier version of thisarticle was an invited presentation at the InternationalConference on “Socio-economic Strategies for CentralVietnam at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century,”April 20–21, 2000, in Danang, Vietnam.

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Address for correspondence: Joe Peters, 2413 Trace 24, WestLafayette, IN 47906, USAPhone: +1-765-497-3620; Fax: +1-765-497-4653; E-mail:[email protected]

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