Mind the GAP: Vietnamese Rice Farmers and Distal Markets

The region of the Mekong River Delta is the most important rice-producing region in Vietnam. Changes in global rice market demands combined with the Vietnamese state’s interest in the economic development of its rural areas are currently influencing agricultural production practices in the region. With a lead farmer in the settlement of Truong Thang, Tam, as the key figure, this chapter investigates what happens when local rice farmers are encouraged to adopt a new production model and internationally recognized “good agricultural practices” (GAPs) in order to become part of a global high-value rice production network. The aim of this chapter was to emphasize some of the local processes of change that are part of a larger regional transformation process with the potential to change the dynamics of the global rice market. For the farmers, the production of GAP-certified high-value rice intended for export markets is radically different from what they are used to. It necessitates a new kind of knowledge, a new organization of production, new time cycles, a new distribution of responsibility, and the formation of new relations between people in their settlements. The analysis of this chapter is based on empirical fieldwork conducted in the Truong Thang settlement in Can Tho Province of the Mekong River Delta region. Based on this work, the key argument of the chapter is that the conversion of production practices that is currently taking place is not a simple case of local adaption to an international demand. Rather, it is a complex process of reconfiguration of societal and territorial embeddedness as the conversion of production practices is necessarily entangled with settlement and household spaces. The conversion of practices essentially relies on local processes of negotiation, on the entrepreneurship of individuals, and on the willingness and ability of farmers to internalize new values, i.e., perform the change.