Word: riceland
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French colonialism was rapidly transforming Vietnamese society in the first decades of this century. Modern French agricultural techniques were opening up vast stretches of riceland and creating a new class of powerful client landlords. French labor agents were uprooting growing numbers of Vietnamese from their ancient villages and shipping them to burgeoning rubber plantations, where the Vietnamese--the French took their names away and assigned them numbers--bitterly confronted a hard and tenuous life torn from their past. Also at this time, Vietnamese national pride was increasing, particularly among the growing class of Vietnamese civil servants who the French trained...
Since U.S. officials have been able to move more freely through South Viet Nam, the extent of damage there is more readily assessed. The agriculture of the South needs extensive rebuilding; nearly 1,000,000 acres of valuable riceland were abandoned during the war. Most of the 2,500-mile system of canals and dikes was similarly neglected, allowing salt water to damage cropland. Dredging sludge from the canals and restoring fertility to the fields will be a slow and expensive process, demanding both massive manpower and large amounts of fertilizer...
...enacted into law this month, South Viet Nam's 800,000 tenant farmers, at no cost to themselves, will be able to take full possession of the land they now till. The 40,000 landowners who hold more than 80% of South Viet Nam's cultivable riceland will, in effect, be bought out by the government for a total of $400 million in cash and bonds. The U.S. has promised to provide 10% of the amount. Says Thieu's new Minister of Agriculture, Cao Van Than, who is the architect of the reform program: "We are trying...
...biggest loans and subsidies to the huge corporation farms. Example: Delta & Pine Land Co., a 37,000-acre, English-owned plantation in Mississippi, drew $1,167,502.35 in Government price-support loans on its 1957 cotton crop, $20,761.20 in soil-bank subsidy (now partly abandoned) for not planting riceland. Example: Westlake Farms, Inc., of Stratford, Calif., did a heads-we-win-tails-you-lose business with taxpayer money: $854,450.67 from Commodity Credit Corp. for the cotton it raised, $125,942.50 from the soil bank for the cotton it did not raise. Because of a small 1957 crop...
...other millions like Ah Teng. Red leaders in Hankow proclaimed flood relief along the Yangtze as the party's most urgent task. Red armies sloshed southward across swamped fields, heavy guns sinking into the mud. There were mass levies of peasants to shore up dikes and save the riceland. Seven women who each toted more than 70 crates of mud in a nightlong fight against the waters were acclaimed as "flood labor heroes...
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