In the 1980s, McCarty said, smaller rice harvests and inadequate infrastructure sometimes led to local famines in mountainous districts even as the Mekong Delta was exporting rice at high profits.
McCarty said he thinks that today, much larger harvests and better infrastructure have minimized that risk and the association’s twin mission, to ensure both domestic food security and high export revenues, creates a confusing conflict of interest.
As for increasing Vietnamese harvests, Ut said he was skeptical that Vietnam could ever surpass Thailand.
“Their yields are higher than Vietnam’s,” Ut said. “Their quality is higher.”
If Vietnam wants to increase its harvests, senior economist Samarendu Mohanty of the International Rice Research Institute in Manila agreed, it should concentrate on improving yields rather than government intervention to increase rice paddy under cultivation.
“The market should decide where land goes,” Mohanty said. “The more important thing is to produce more rice in the limited land we have available.”
He recommended increased investment in irrigation and development of frost-tolerant and drought-tolerant rice strains.
But separating the government from economic decisions, whether about rice or otherwise, is not standard practice in Vietnam, McCarty said.
“The whole philosophy [in capitalist countries] is keep the bastards apart, keep the businessmen apart from the officials,” McCarty said.
By contrast, “in Vietnam, you have a consensus system where they sit around a table and work out what’s best. Mostly, they get it right, but it’s hard to say in many cases what’s best for Vietnam, and the power blocs always win,” he said.
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