Capitol Ideas/Land Reform Lost Vietnam

...Dore wrote in Land Reform in Japan...

...The Philippines wasanother of his laboratories, and in 1980 he helped design the "land to the tiller" plan in El Salvador—implemented with the aid of U.S...

...Fox found that tillers who had been drafted into the military were being treated as absentees...

...Until 1965 the leading advocate of land reform in the U.S...

...the Soviet Union...

...His ideal appears to be a world of self-employed smallholders...

...But the New York Times reported that "surprisingly, the overwhelming opposition from the wealthy landed interests did not materialize as some predicted...

...By November 1971, Prosterman was referring to the reform (then underway) as "highly successful...

...The land was then transferred (as the law required) to those who were doing the tilling?draft dodgers and those too weak or too old to fight...

...External imposition helped make the reform peaceful...

...What had gone wrong...

...It was enacted "in virtually its original form," Prosterman has written, "after an eight-month fight against landlord interests...

...He cites USDA claims that rice productivity increased 30 percent after the reform...

...Those who rent their land lack a "secure and remunerative relationship" with it...

...In April 1975 another 100,000-ton emergency shipment of U.S...

...I suspect many are running restaurants and convenience stores in the U.S...

...Crucially, the new owners were not allowed to sell "their" land for fifteen years...

...Landlessness" is the theme of Prosterman's book Land Reform and Democratic Development (co-authored by Jeffrey Riedinger...

...The program called for "the free distribution of substantially all privately owned land that is not owner-cultivated," its American author wrote at the time...

...So the tillers were not owners at all...

...By that time, apparently, 30,000 former owners, covering a tenth of the redistributed land, had received a down payment...

...As the political analyst Jude Wanniski noted in 1981: The landowners packed their worthless bonds and valuable capital and moved to Saigon or Paris...

...Vietnamese landlords were to be reimbursed with a 20 percent down payment, the value assessed at two and a half times the annual rice crop...

...By reducing the Vietcong's appeal in the countryside, it could add inducement to Hanoi to negotiate peace...

...Korea and Taiwan had also been under Japanese administration until 1945, and there, too, a rearranged ownership was an acceptable component of the new order...

...One U.S...

...The overwhelming power and prestige of the Occupation Army, which lay behind the law, helped induce in the landlords a feeling of overawed resignation...

...The leftist Investigative Resource Center in Oakland listed him as a "neoconservative...

...At one point Lyndon Johnson said the tillers would be given aerial photographs of "their" land (as a form of title...

...tax dollars...

...Tenant farmers are to get ownership of the land they rent up to a limit of 7.5 acres in the Delta and 2.5 acres in the Central Vietnam lowlands...

...We should do the job properly--take the land and give it honestly...

...Considerable credit for the reform," the Times added, "can be ascribed to an American scholar, Prof...

...rice was reported...

...By the late 1980s, the destabilizing effects of expropriating and redistributing property in foreign countries was finally understood in Washington, and it is no longer U.S...

...The Shah helped undermine himself by cooperating with American land reformers in Iran, and Eduardo Frei's foolish schemes in Chile—paid for by the U.S.—helped bring Salvador Allende to power...

...If a new "owner" himself decided to leave the land and find another to till it, he became an "absentee landowner" in turn and subject to one more expropriation...

...In October, with the Communists in charge and Saigon about to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City, it was announced that 1.5 million people were being sent "back to the land," for a "return to farming...

...William Shawcross reported from the field in 1974 that "in 1971 rice cost $150 a ton in Saigon...

...This wasn't because the Vietnamese had any delusions about Communism, as their desperate attempts to board American helicopters showed...

...The price of rice jumped by 40 percent in 1973, and "the United States now plans to bring in 400,000 tons of its own rice in 1974," Robert Shaplen reported in the New Yorker...

...1 n April 1970, the New York Times called the program it had successfully promoted "probably the most ambitious and progressive non-Communist land reform" of the twentieth century: Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...

...Tenants could take over the land, not with the light of revolution in their eyes, but half apologetically," R.P...

...Government officials admit that the only short term solution to the food shortage is for people to eat less...

...But I believe it may have been considerable...

...even as I write...

...This destroyed the market for land...

...But he worried that the New York Times was overlooking these "millions of prosperous peasants...

...Thepaper duly sent a reporter, Thomas Fox, into the field, and he did what land reformers rarely do...

...But inflation was much higher than the interest rate, and once landlords received their down payment, they had little reason to stick around...

...In the coastal area near Hue, "people are eating roots of trees and bushes," and in Quang Ngai, Shawcross wrote, "whole families are attempting to survive on one meal of three sweet potatoes and a few land crabs a day...

...The program was pushed even harder, right up to the end of the war in 1974...

...He actually interviewed a landlord: "A 52-year-old peasant landowner with 20 acres said, 'I have never been a rich man, just enough to eat, but now the government has taken away most of my land and they have given me nothing in return.?Another farmer in Longan province told Fox: "I do not know a single landowner who has received money for land taken from him...

...Blameable human agents" appear only with private property, which alone needs the attention of land reformers...

...It came too late, he explains...

...He thereby contrives to undermine ownership even while seeming to promote it...

...Now it is $500," and "priced out of the reach of millions...

...In his eccentric index, published in 1987, East Germany ranked ahead of the United States in agricultural productivity, Bulgaria ahead of Norway, and collectivized agriculture was said to provide an "engine for development" in...

...By April, the Far Eastern Economic Review reported, rice in South Vietnam was in "extremely short supply...

...p rosterman always used the rhetoric of ownership when describing his plans in congressional hearings and op-ed pieces, and he advertised the appeal of such arguments to conservatives...

...The new land-to-the-tiller law, which pledges the country's one million tenant farmers ownership of practically all the land they rent, promises more than social justice...

...There was no way they could sell their land...

...Each community lost the human capital of the departed landowner, his political and organizational skills...

...the last pockets to fall to the VC were those that had resisted land reform...

...Why Communism should have been a model at all is not clear...

...policy...

...E ncouraging an existing government to expropriate its most powerful class is a very different matter, however...

...His former law student (Mark Pearlman) and two other land reformers were shot and killed by soldiers in the San Salvador Sheraton in 1981...

...The long American search for development by redistribution was inspired by the examples of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, where land was peacefully redistributed after World War II...

...In 1979, with the Sandinistas taking over, he appealed for $700 million to be sent to Nicaragua to "support a moderate result," and prevent the "dedicated Marxists" among the Sandinistas from taking power...

...They were anchored to the paddy fields in the worst kind of feudal way...

...In 1976 he thought the reform had been "highly successful...

...By 1970, we read, a "giant IBM 360 computer" in the U.S...

...A key Prosterman ally and occasional co-author was Mary Temple, executive director of the Manhattan-based Land Council...

...But this is not believable in light of the facts...

...His chapter on Vietnam reads like an account of a successful operation—at the end of which the patient died...

...the rest was payable in bonds...

...Her husband, Robert Kleiman, was a member of the New York Times editorial board...

...It is possible that South Vietnam was crucially destabilized by this reform...

...In light of the war, and the general turmoil of the time, it is difficult to assess its importance in undermining Thieu...

...In March 1970, after much pressure from Americans and a mini-campaign in the New York Times, Thieu enacted a "sweeping" land reform that destroyed property rights in about three-fifths of the cultivated land of South Vietnam...

...CI 18 The American Spectator June 1995...

...Relief officials were expecting a "big rise in malnutrition...

...Thieu submitted it to the National Assembly in 1969...

...Nonetheless, he believes that those on collective farms in Marxist countries enjoy "ownership or ownership-like rights," asdo those on tribal lands...

...But, as we shall see, those people never enjoyed anything resembling property rights...

...The landlords who constituted the backbone of such support as Thieu enjoyed were left with little remaining stake in the country...

...The land would be "given" to those who tilled it...

...But the Thieu regime had indeed failed to win the "hearts and minds" of the people...

...But it was...

...Land Reform Can Be the Marxist's Worst Enemy" was the title of a 1983 article he wrote for the Journal...

...His argument, taken up by Prosterman, was that ownership was the best antidote to Communism: the Marxists took property and distributed it, but then betrayed their 16 The American Spectator June 1995 promise by collectivization...

...Roy L. Prosterman, who campaigned tirelessly for it in Washington and Saigon at a time when American official support waxed and waned...

...was Wolf Ladejinsky at the Department of Agriculture...

...program in South Vietnam has received almost no attention...

...A Harvard graduate (1958) and professor of law at the University of Washington, Prosterman has been the leading American advocate and practitioner of land reform since the mid-sixties...

...But, hey, by then there were no more landlords...

...Later the law was "simplified" to achieve its true purpose: abolition of tenancy...

...Many of these landlords are presumed to have left the country well ahead of the Communists' arrival in Saigon...

...As for the original owners, typecast as villains, they did well to leave the country once they received their down payment...

...I have never seen a published estimate of the number of expropriated landlords, but it may have been 200,000 or higher...

...It has become an important element in the efforts of the Saigon Government to gain political support...

...He is the rare advocate who has managed to get both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal editorial pages on his side...

...In 1968 Prosterman joined Clark Kerr's National Committee for a Political Settlement in Vietnam...

...The invisible fabric of the community having been destroyed, it became easy prey for the Viet Cong as productivity slumped and bills came due...

...Anyone who was working the land of another simply became its owner...

...AID building in Saigon "will soon begin churning out titles for about 2.5 million acres of land...

...In fact, they were put in a hopeless position...

...As Iver Peterson wrote in the New York Times in 1969: "At least Saigon has stolen a major plank from the Communists' platform, which is as good a way as any to compete with them...

...The "prototype" of the land-reform law was drafted by Prosterman in 1967, and brought to Thieu's attention by Robert Coate, then-chairman of the Democratic Party for Northern California...

...Here, the military defeat of Japan was the key...

...Prosterman claimed that the beneficiaries included "over half the total rural population...

...In March 1974 President Thieu was "ordering" an increase in agricultural production, and vowing to "force war refugees in the cities to move back to farm areas...

...I n July 1975 he told Hubert Humphrey in congressional testimony that Vietnam's land reform had "worked very well in productivity terms"—the Vietnamese Communists were wisely preserving it...