メコンデルタにおける土地利用と経済社会開発史

Abstract

The problem of landownership in the Mekong Delta was of decisive importance to the result of the war in South Vietnam ended in April 1975 by the victory of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (PRG), and also it is expected to be very important in estimating the political and socio-economic future of the country. Considering these conditions, the author makes a historical analysis of the problem of landownership in the Mekong Delta. Chapter I comments on the evolution of rice culture and the institutionalization of a system of landlord control over the 1862-1945 period. The following chapters are directed to analysis of the changing process of landholding in the Delta after the Second World War. Chapter II examines the land reform by the Viet Minh regime over the 1945-1954 period. The Viet Minh lowered rents and redistributed the land to tenants in the area they controlled. But during the interregnum of 1954-1959, the socio-institutional accomplishments of the Viet Minh were reversed by the Ngo Dinh Diem regime aided by the U. S. Government. Chapter III is a study of land reform by the Ngo Dinh Diem regime in the later half of 1950s. This land reform also aimed to protect the farmer's tenancy rights and redistributed paddy land to the farmers by limiting an owner's holding to 100 ha. But the effect of these land reform decrees had not been clearly established because this reform was accompanied by many abuses, and moreover this reform gave much less benefit to the tenants than the Viet Minh reform. Chapter IV examines the development of the 1960s NLF (National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, after June 1969 PRG=Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam) land policies and the favorable response to them by the farmers in the Delta. Chapter V discusses the new land reform by the Nguyen Van Thieu regime, planned as the South Vietnamese and U. S. Governments' most useful counter measure to NLF (PRG) land policies, in the beginning of the 1970s. With this new reform, the Government of South Vietnam aimed to give farmers almost the same benefits as the NLF reforms and granted rights even to tenants who had received land in the NLF distribution. This new reform was carried out relatively well. But even by this land reform, the superiority of the PRG over the Nguyen Van Thieu regime in the Mekong Delta was not changed. Through these land reforms of various Vietnamese regimes after the Second World War, the situation of landownership in the Mekong Delta has changed remarkably. Especially the size of landholding owned diminished markedly, and many tenants having become de facto masters of the land they tilled economic differences among farmers in the Delta are decreasing. Under these conditions, the PRG, two months after the liberation of all South Vietnam, recommenced the distribution of land to the farmers in the Mekong Delta for the completion of land reform as the foundation for building the socialist economy. Future changes of political and socio-economic conditions in the Mekong Delta after are worth attention.