Pamela McElwee

You Say Illegal, I Say Legal

Abstract Vietnam is estimated to have lost more than half of its forest cover in the past 50 years, with a number of contributing causes. The state nationalization of all forest resources during socialist rule from 1954 to the opening of the economy in the 1980s contributed significantly to illegal logging, as any locally-used forest was considered to be national property. During this period, there was a generalized ‘free-for-all’ on the forests, contributing to a massive breakdown of local tenure rules and resource allocation. Despite the dissolution of many of the state-owned logging reserves and distribution of this land to local communities, which began in the late 1980s, deforestation has continued. During the 1990s, an export ban on raw logs from Vietnam was enacted to halt the continued deforestation, with generally ineffective results. While the state continues to blame local people for illegal logging and attendant deforestation, this paper will show that perceived criminal and corrupt actions by the government have significantly contributed to the problem. Furthermore, the paper will explain how local people terms as ‘illegal loggers’ explain their actions in terms of social justice, poverty alleviation, and local control, rather than in the states terms of ‘illegality’.

Resource Use Among Rural Agricultural Households Near Protected Areas in Vietnam: The Social Costs of Conservation and Implications for Enforcement

This article examines the use of forests in a protected area by nearby agriculturalists in central Vietnam. Research indicates that the majority of rural farmers interviewed who lived near a state designated protected area were receiving both subsistence and cash incomes from forest-based activities, primarily from the collection of forest products. However, much of the collection of forest produce was officially illegal, as it occurred in state protected forests, and interdiction efforts were on the increase. Yet, little attention has been paid in Vietnam to the need for income substitution for households who lose access to forest produce as a result of conservation enforcement, particularly in the case of farmers who live near, but not in, protected areas; their resources use has been ‘invisible’ due to a lack of attention and research on the topic. This misunderstanding of the importance of forests to rural farmers has the potential to result in households facing adverse welfare and livelihood outcomes as protected areas boundaries are tightened, and local communities face increased opportunity costs due to stricter conservation enforcement. The article concludes that substitution for loss of income due to conservation activities would best be achieved through carefully targeted interventions to specific high-impact and high-dependency households. Additionally, investments in new sources of wage labor and other low capital-input activities, rather than in agriculture, would likely be of most benefit.

Flood vulnerability among rural households in the Red River Delta of Vietnam: implications for future climate change risk and adaptation

The Red River Delta (RRD) of Vietnam, one of the world’s most densely populated deltas, is already vulnerable to flooding events, and climate change forecasts project increased exposure to flood risk in coming decades due to changes in rainfall, storm intensity and frequency, and sea-level rise. However, there is a relative neglect of this region in the literature on natural hazards and climate change, particularly on how floods in the RRD might affect poor people and different livelihood sectors, how flood risk is understood and acted on, and how flood impacts experienced by households influence local adaptation choices. This article presents research undertaken in 2009–2010 to understand the impacts of flooding in a typical rural zone (Thai Binh Province) of the RRD to assess overall vulnerability, particularly the relationship between poverty, livelihoods, and flood impacts, as well as to assess the range of adaptation and flood risk reduction options currently used. Our findings indicate that while poor households do not appear to be more exposed to floods than others, their incomes are more sensitive to relative impacts from floods. Yet poverty alone did not explain flood vulnerability, as age of household and livelihood sector involvement showed stronger relationships to flood impacts. Flood risk perceptions were also uneven, but poor people did not seem to take less proactive flood risk reduction measures than others. There are few long-term adaptation actions to flooding being taken by households of any income class, and there is a need for better community and government aid after flood events to help households cope with increased flood risks in the RRD, rather than relying on improvements in hard infrastructure, as is currently the dominant approach in the region, particularly given future forecasts of increased rainfall for northern Vietnam under climate change.