FORPOL-01210; No of Pages 8

Forest Policy and Economics xxx (2014) xxxxxx

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Forest Policy and Economics

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A new landlord (a ch mi)? Community, land conict and State Forest Companies
(SFCs) in Vietnam
Phuc Xuan To a,, Sango Mahanty b, Wolfram H. Dressler c
a
b
c

Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacic, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
ARC Future Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacic, The Australian National University, Australia
ARC Future Fellow, School of Geography, The University of Melbourne, Australia

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 4 March 2014
Received in revised form 24 October 2014
Accepted 24 October 2014
Available online xxxx
Keywords:
Land conicts
State Forest Company
Community
Agricultural commodities
Vietnam

a b s t r a c t
In much of Southeast Asia, the rise of rural land conicts and struggles often parallels market expansion into
frontiers, a collage of historical state interventions, negotiations over state authority and contested legitimacy.
Scholarship on Vietnam has yielded important insights on the changes wrought by new commodity booms
and hybrid forms of state engagement in markets. With the recent escalation of land conict between
Vietnam's State Forest Companies (SFCs) and farmers, this paper builds on past research to examine why this current wave of SFCfarmer conict is occurring, and what it means for the relationships between SFCs, farming
communities and the central state. Based on our analysis of two sites of intense conict, we argue that changes
to SFC governance, together with rapidly evolving commodity markets and livelihood pressures are bringing a
new edge to land negotiations. Policy changes that aimed to improve the efciency of Vietnam's state companies
have transformed SFCs from state-run businesses into hybrid state-private entities that are required to sustain a
prot. Yet SFCs' ongoing connection with the state ensures their continued control of valuable forestlands, and
emboldens SFCs to out state rules to monopolize land and engage local farmers in exploitative tenancy contracts. For farmers, the SFC has changed from the local face of the state, that heavily exploited timber, restricted
local forest access and provided some local infrastructure and services, to a privileged market actor bent on prot.
This situation has intensied with growing local demand for land to sustain livelihoods and to feed Chinese and
global demand for cassava and softwood. While Vietnamese markets continue to reect a strong state hand, we
show that SFCs' hybrid identity as both a state and market actor poses new risks for the central state. When
farmers openly challenge SFCs over land and reference colonial arrangements through the language of a new
landlord, they question the legitimacy and role of the state in the face of new market pressures and
opportunities.
2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Across landscapes, conicts over land often reect deeper struggles
that are nested within broader historical political and economic
processes (Sikor and Lund, 2009; Hall et al., 2011). Although Vietnam
has avoided the land appropriation and exclusion associated with the
large-scale foreign direct investment of its neighbors (Sikor, 2012),
land conicts are rife. This paper examines why land conicts have
risen sharply between farmers and State Forest Companies1 (SFCs) in
Vietnam's uplands, and what such conicts tell us about the state's
changing presence and role in markets. Local farmers competing for
This article belongs to the Special Issue: Community Forestry.
Corresponding author. Tel.: +84 988 266 766.
E-mail addresses: phuc.to@anu.edu.au (P.X. To), Sango.mahanty@anu.edu.au
(S. Mahanty), wolfram.dressler@unimelb.edu.au (W.H. Dressler).
1
Originally termed State Forest Enterprises (SFEs), regulatory changes in 1991 (Decree
338) changed SFEs into State Forest Companies (SFCs); for consistency, we use the latter
term throughout this paper.

land are now representing these SFCs as a new landlord that controls
land at their expense, echoing colonial and pre-colonial land tenure
arrangements. An uncomfortable t between hybrid state institutions
like the SFC and untamed market dynamics spawns bold local
challenges to state authority in areas of SFC operation. While scholars
have shown how the Vietnamese state continues to steer markets and
its former state enterprises (Fforde, 2009; McElwee, 2011), our analysis
of SFCs explores the opposite side of this equation: are there inherent
risks to state legitimacy in these hybrid arrangements?
Vietnam's SFCs are transitioning into hybrid state-private entities
that must wend their own way. Once the local face of the state in frontier areas, set up to centrally control forest production and consolidate
state authority, SFC governance reforms have tried to transform these
cumbersome entities into efcient market actors. However, former
state enterprises are subject to continued surveillance and government
inuence, leaving them unable to effectively overcome past inefciencies
(McElwee, 2004; Gainsborough, 2010). Meanwhile, public discourse in
the national media has started to represent SFCs as a predatory market

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2014.10.005
1389-9341/ 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: To, P.X., et al., A new landlord (a ch mi)? Community, land conict and State Forest Companies (SFCs) in Vietnam,
Forest Policy and Economics (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2014.10.005

P.X. To et al. / Forest Policy and Economics xxx (2014) xxxxxx

actor that monopolizes forest access in contravention of state forest land

allocation policies, and prots from exploitative local labor contracts. In
this context, SFCs are being described as a new landlord (a ch mi),
echoing exploitative land relations in colonial times. We nd that
through this narrative villagers question SFC legitimacy, perceiving it as
a privileged actor on the state's teat (To et al., 2013). Through this,
wider questions arise about the evolving nature of the Vietnamese
state and its dynamic relationship with rural communities in the throws
of a commodity boom.
We start by reviewing current knowledge on the causes of land
conict in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Although Vietnam has escaped
the land grabs aficting its neighbors (Sikor, 2012), domestic SFCs
have made parallel claims to, and consolidated control over, land and
productive resources. These hybrid entities produce complex relationships of authority, power and access across scale (Hall et al., 2011;
Sikor and Lund, 2009), whose most visible expressions are land negotiations and conicts. Past Vietnamese scholarship on land has uncovered
how land negotiations are both mediated and challenged by state
authority (e.g. Kerkvliet, 2005; Sowerwine, 2004; Harms, 2012;
Nguyen, 2007; Labbe, 2011). Yet, it is timely to assess how the causes
and implications of land conict might be changing with the hybridization of SFCs.
We then outline the methodology for this research. Our analysis of
SFCfarmer land conict starts with the discussion of changes to SFC
governance at a time of rapidly growing Chinese and global demand
for acacia and cassava. We then consider how SFC governance changes
have contributed to two cases of land conict between SFCs and local
communities in the uplands. In both cases, we are witnessing a second
round of SFC-related land conict: the rst came with the initial establishment of SFCs in the 1950s to manage forests and timber (McElwee,
2004), while the current wave stems from their competition with
local farmers to secure productive land for lucrative commodity markets. This second wave is largely the result of recolonization of the
same territory for another valued resource productive land by
newly hybridized SFCs. We examine the character and implications of
this reconguration of SFC relationships to land and local communities,
and the risks it may pose for statesociety relations.
2. Theoretical context: land, markets and statesociety relations
In much of Southeast Asia, rural land conicts and struggles often
occur at the intersection of frontier market expansion and historical
state interventions (Hall et al., 2011). Here, legacies of state regulation
can interact in complex ways with local norms, cultures and interests,
framing the context for land access and use (Hall et al., 2011; von
Benda-Beckmann et al., 2006). In particular, Vietnam's recent spike in
land conicts in areas of intensied commodity production for acacia
and cassava markets highlights how commodication and market
processes may recursively frame negotiations between state actors
and other land users. Vietnam provides a critical window into marketstate dynamics, emerging from a major period of political economic
transition, with its once socialist economy undergoing various market
reforms and decentralization.
Historically, Vietnam's upland forests have been signicant for the
consolidation of state authority, with varying degrees of acquiescence
and resistance from resident populations (Sowerwine, 2011: 59).
These frontier territories were often of central importance to former
Vietnamese rulers (Sowerwine, 2011), as they struggled to effectively
manage the non-Confucian peoples who shared their extended
frontiers in ways that would enhance their legitimacy and control
(Woodside, 1988). French rule saw the systematic mapping and xing
of upland territories and borders (Kunstadter, 1967 in Sowerwine,
2011: 59), setting forest reserves in 1891, and imposing restrictions
on swidden in the 1930s (Sowerwine, 2011: 60). The nexus between
controlling upland forests and people and strengthening state authority
galvanized during the revolutionary period (194675), with border

areas gaining even greater strategic signicance (Sowerwine, 2011:

613). In these locations, State Forest Corporations (then State Forest
Enterprises) played a central role in timber extraction and restricting
shifting cultivation (McElwee, 2004: 113). The tensions experienced
during initial SFC formation and associated restrictions to local access
have only intensied over time, as market pressures create more intense competition for land. This is in spite of the closure of several
SFCs and efforts to govern SFCs more effectively (McElwee, 2004).
The phrase landlord (a ch in Vietnamese), seen in recent commentary about SFCs, harks back to land relations in the French colonial
period (the 1720th centuries) when existing inequities in land distribution were solidied (Taylor, 2013). Through the auctioning of communal and abandoned lands to French citizens and collaborators in
the South, a powerful landlord class emerged in the South, serviced by
tenant farmers and sharecropping, as well as greater land accumulation
in central and northern Vietnam (Dao, 1993; Ngo, 1991: 44). Exploitative sharecropping arrangements stripped tenants of about half of
their gross income, while they had to bear all the cultivation costs,
often through loans from landlords on exorbitant terms (Ngo, 1991:
467). Along with hunger and exploitation (White, 1986: 58), the
colonial tenancy system also engendered tension and distrust between
landlords and tenants (Ngo, 1991: 51). The contemporary use of
the term new landlord for SFCs thus reects strong perceptions of
exploitation at a heavy local cost, as in colonial times.
While colonial policies concentrated agricultural holdings, subsequent state practices such as boundary demarcation, registration and
mapping facilitated the enclosure of natural resources for both private
and state accumulation, with the state becoming a key arbiter of formal
resource entitlements (Sikor, 2012; Sowerwine, 2004). Yet informal
claims to and use of land persist, often in direct challenge to laws
(Ho-Tai and Sidel, 2013; To, 2013). These factors have contributed to
intransigent resource conicts in the Vietnamese uplands, particularly
between state agencies (e.g. SFCs) and local people asserting customary
rights or new migrants hungry for land (To et al., 2013; Hoang, 2011;
McElwee, 2004). At the same time, land-related interactions shape the
image and practice of the state from the perspective of local and nonstate actors (Sikor, 2012; Migdal, 2001). Furthermore, the government's
property formalization projects such as land allocation were never as
complete in the uplands as in the lowlands (Kerkvliet, 2005; Sikor,
2012) and so allowed degrees of local exibility in the implementation
of land policies and autonomy over land. Thus, recent resource conicts
reect the changing context and role of state enterprises, as well as
overlapping claims and tensions around state reach in these frontiers
areas.
Various scholars question a monolithic notion of the state as a
coherent, controlling body that governs its territory and populace
via a rational and organized bureaucracy (e.g. Gainsborough, 2010;
Migdal, 2001). The natural tendency, with Vietnam's single party
state, is to attribute ultimate power to the communist party and elite
ofcials, whose authority is evident through centrally framed policy as
well as key political and government appointments (Ho-Tai and Sidel,
2013; Kerkvliet, 2004). Yet Migdal highlights how state practices can
in fact make visible signicant internal tensions amongst state actors
(2001); in Vietnam, for instance, evidence is building of the tensions
faced by commune ofcials in balancing central and local agendas and
their resulting non-compliance with ofcial policies (Sikor, 2004;
Mahanty and Dang, in press). Kerkvliet's work shows that state
authority is equivocal in the face of local resistance (2004), reecting
the state's internal complexities, diffuse edges and mutable powers.
Indeed, perceptions of the central state and how this changes in new domains of action, the gap between state image and practice in the realm
of forests, as well as differences between the central and local state are
central to our analysis.
In relation to forests, the Vietnamese central state operates in
contingent ways that at times reinforce state authority and at others
weaken it. Ideas regarding what the state is and what the state ought

Please cite this article as: To, P.X., et al., A new landlord (a ch mi)? Community, land conict and State Forest Companies (SFCs) in Vietnam,
Forest Policy and Economics (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2014.10.005

P.X. To et al. / Forest Policy and Economics xxx (2014) xxxxxx

to be, are realized through state policy and the local practices and reactions of local people in terms of resource rights (Sikor, 2012). As Lund
and Boone (2013: 1) note, Struggles over property may be as much
about the scope and structure of authority as about access to resources,
and can therefore hold important insights about these broader political
negotiations. We explore this dynamic in the case of SFCs competing
with local villagers for land.
Our research particularly considers the new challenges posed by
markets for state authority. From its distributive role within highly controlled markets, the state has become a market facilitator (Fforde, 2009)
and gatekeeper (Gainsborough, 2010) as it rethinks the position of its
SFCs. We explore how the related processes of SFC reform, forestland allocation and commodity markets contribute to recent land conicts in
the uplands, and what this illustrates about the evolving Vietnamese
state and its relationship to rural society.
3. Field methods
Our analysis draws on two major data collection efforts. Data on SFC
restructuring and how this intersects with historical and current land
use were gained through 70 interviews and four focus group meetings
during To's visits to 16 SFCs in 2012. Additionally, in 20122013, To
joined an expert team to advise Vietnam's Forestry Administration
(VNFOREST) on SFC restructuring. This allowed further participant observation in government meetings and additional interviews with key
informants in central government and civil society (eight policy makers,
12 senior forestry experts and three NGO leaders). The advisory group
visited two conict sites (Fig. 1): (i) Dong Bac (Lang Son province)
and (ii) Long Dai (Quang Binh province), which are the focal cases
discussed in this paper. Here, further interviews were conducted with
village headmen. The team also held focus group discussions (FGDs)
with village leaders to understand historical land relations and contemporary land use practices by different groups in the village. In-depth interviews were conducted with 25 households (41% of total village
households) in the rst study village (Cot Coi), and with 30 households
(43% of the total village households) in the second village (Khe Cat).
These interviews were used to examine household land uses and changes over time. In-depth interviews also provided data on how different
groups of villagers viewed local and SFC land use practices. Direct observations in the villages provided important insights to the reections,
views and activities of different actors involved in the land conicts.
Major reports from government and consultants on land and forests
have also been reviewed, along with government policy and legislation
on land, forests and state corporations.
4. State Forest Companies and land conict in the uplands
4.1. The changing governance of State Forest Companies
Changes to the governance of State Forest Companies (formerly
Enterprises) are an essential starting point to understanding the
current wave of land conict, given their central role in Vietnam's
post-independence forest management regime. From a period of control by the French colonial administration the Vietnamese government
nationalized all of the country's forests after gaining independence in
1954 (Sowerwine, 2004; McElwee, 2004). During the 1960s1980s,
these forests were managed by a system of SFCs under the Ministry of
Forestry or provincial Peoples' Committees (PCs). Formally, local people
were excluded from the management and use of these forests. However,
as forests were poorly demarcated, and forest regulations poorly
enforced, informal local use continued. During this period, SFCs primarily focused on timber extraction rather than forest protection (Nguyen,
2001; McElwee, 2004). Timber extraction peaked in the rst half of the
1980s, corresponding with a pronounced loss of forest cover in Vietnam.
In some upland areas, SFCs also played a central developmental role,
providing public goods while consolidating state control of these

frontiers (Sikor, 2012; Nguyen, 2001). Echoing the efforts of earlier

Vietnamese and French rulers, the state used SFCs as one of several
mechanisms to civilize the uplands and extend its functional authority
into these frontiers so as to gradually assimilate these local communities
with those of the civilized lowlands (McElwee, 2004; Salemink, 2011).
Specically, SFCs built schools, roads, and local markets for their
workers, which were also available to neighboring communities
(Nguyen, 2001). In remote areas where commune and district PCs
were relatively absent, SFCs became the local face of the state (or the
local state), undertaking household registration and social security
services (Nguyen, 2001). SFCs in border areas were also expected to
protect national security. The formation of SFCs and their daily practices
were thus central to state efforts to extend its functional authority in upland frontiers.
The late 1980s saw a crisis in forestry, due to the national
government's weakened nancial situation wrought by the end of the
Soviet era, as well as timber over-exploitation by SFCs. By 1986, fewer
than 50% of the SFCs had available timber and, with budget cuts from
government, were left without operating resources (Nguyen, 2001).
Conicts erupted as villagers demanded access to land for cultivation
that they believed had been encroached and monopolized by SFCs
(Sikor, 1998; McElwee, 2004). With the opening of Vietnamese markets
in 1986, the market for illegally harvested timber also ourished, and
villagers went to SFC-managed forests to glean any remaining timber
for sale (Sikor and To, 2011; Hoang, 2011). Small-scale illegal logging
was another reason for enduring forest conict. This became a signicant time of forest loss due to SFCs' activities, informal logging and forest
clearance for swidden cultivation (Nguyen, 2001).
In response to the forest sector crisis, the government commissioned
a major Forestry Sector Review from 19891991. In view of declining
forest cover and the weakened position of SFCs, the review recommended shifting forest policy from one of timber exploitation to forest protection and development. Forestry was to be restructured in line with the
i mi (renovation) policy, toward less state control and more private
sector engagement. The 1990s therefore saw reduced timber harvest
from natural forests, reduction in the number of SFCs, and programs
to allocate production forests for use by local households.2
These changes to forest management occurred in parallel with state
initiatives to increase SFC autonomy and reduce their dependence on
central budgets. Decree 338 (1991), which changed state forest enterprises into SFCs required their nancial independence from the state,
with nominal management by the provincial PCs or the Ministry of
Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD). By October 1993, some
411 SFCs had been formed, of which 69 (16.8%) were managed by
MARD and the remaining 343 (83.2%) by provincial PCs (Nguyen,
2001). The Land Law in 1993 added the potential for productive
forestland to be transferred from state to state and non-state entities, including local communities, premised on the constitutional principle
that land belongs to the people, and is managed by the state; the
state will allocate land to land users for stable and long-term uses
(Constitution, 2014). Though some SFCs transferred their land to local
people, many resisted (Nguyen, 2001).
By the second half of the 1990s, the over-optimistic vision of selfnancing SFCs was evident, with the Vice Minister of MARD's statement
that Almost all SFCs were the same as before (Nguyen, 2001: 207).
Specically, SFCs continued to draw on state budgets for their largescale forest protection and development projects (e.g. Program 327 in
19931998, and Program 661 in 19992010, both for reforestation on
degraded lands). From 1991, SFCs underwent four restructurings, the
most recent being Resolution 28 (2003) and Decree 200 (2004). As
clearly stated in Resolution 28, the foundation for the SFC restructuring
was that SFCs demonstrated ineffective land use and low economic
2
Under the Law on Forest Protection and Development, three forest categories were
designated (special use, protection, and production), each managed through different institutional arrangements.

Please cite this article as: To, P.X., et al., A new landlord (a ch mi)? Community, land conict and State Forest Companies (SFCs) in Vietnam,
Forest Policy and Economics (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2014.10.005

P.X. To et al. / Forest Policy and Economics xxx (2014) xxxxxx

Fig. 1. Location of eld sites.

performance, and were becoming heavily embroiled in local conicts.

In response, the resolution restricted the remit of SFCs to production
forest and specied that SFCs would be regulated by the Enterprise
Law. The resolution also permitted SFCs to contract forestland to other
entities, including local households, for forest protection and production. The resolution allows the dismantling of SFCs that made a loss
for three consecutive years. Finally, SFCs were required to transfer any
schools, roads, irrigation, clinics and electricity infrastructure they had
constructed with state budgets to provincial PCs for the use of local populations. SFC restructuring reduced the existing labor force from about

68,500 people to 16,600 by 2011 (MARD, 2012). Many former employees remained in the area, now requiring land for cultivation, but
some became landless (To et al., 2013).
Decree 200 emphasized that SFCs would only retain the land if they
demonstrated the capacity to use it effectively. Given their loss of labor,
however, SFCs had to hire contract labor to fulll this requirement. For
example, in 2012, Long Dai SFC hired over 800 external workers
(including locals) to supplement its less than 200 in-house staff. This
was the only way for SFCs to retain land while accessing markets for
fast growing timber species. Thus, local people hired by SFCs became

Please cite this article as: To, P.X., et al., A new landlord (a ch mi)? Community, land conict and State Forest Companies (SFCs) in Vietnam,
Forest Policy and Economics (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2014.10.005

P.X. To et al. / Forest Policy and Economics xxx (2014) xxxxxx

incorporated into a mode of production that diverted their labor from

agriculture, but often on exploitative terms.
Meanwhile, markets for fast growing softwood species and cassava
were expanding rapidly in the early 2000s in Vietnam. For instance,
wood processing became the fth largest export earner at about
1518% of GDP annually (To and Tran, 2013), driven largely by
international demand (To and Tran, 2013) as well as donor projects
(e.g. from the World Bank, German Reconstruction Bank) with concessional loans to smallholders. Many local households who gained
forestland certicates in the 1990s were also able to establish forest
plantation and become active participants in the timber market.
Providing incomes of up to 70 million Vietnamese Dong (3200 USD)
per ha after 56 years (To and Tran, 2013), timber markets turned
forestlands into an important vehicle for capital accumulation.
Cassava has followed a different but equally signicant growth trajectory. Once used mainly for household consumption, the area under
cassava nationally has grown rapidly in response to heightened demand
from China, reaching 560,000 ha in 2011 (General Statistics Ofce,
2012). Income from cassava, about 1800 USD per ha annually (Tran,
2014), has driven many, particularly landless, upland villagers to encroach SFC forestlands for cassava cultivation. It is in this context of
land hunger and rapid expansion of land-based commodity markets
that SFCs have become serious competitors for land.

4.2. The conict between Dong Bac Forest Company and Cot Coi village,
Lang Son Province
Dong Bac Forest Company has followed a trajectory similar to the SFCs
discussed above. Currently owned by the Vietnam Forest Corporation
(VinaFor) of MARD, the company manages 21,826 ha of forestland in
three provinces including Lang Son, based on land use certicates granted
to the company in 2001. The company was formerly known as Huu Lung
Forest Enterprise (established in 1961) and managed valuable timber
stocks until the 1980s, when they had declined. The degraded areas
were replanted with fast growing acacia and eucalyptus species in the
1990s. In 2004, Huu Lung became the Dong Bac Forest Company by
which time it had to allocate 12,700 ha of its now cleared land (58% of
its total land holdings) to local authorities for distribution to local people.
After nearly ten years, only 1500 ha have been transferred to the provincial PC of Lang Son. The company director cites: No money for boundary
demarcation as the reason for this slow progress. The director observes
that although much of the 12,700 ha was never formally allocated, it is
nonetheless being cultivated by local people. In fact the retained land
was the most productive, and the company intended to develop this
with the support of its mother company, VinaFor, through state bank
loans at preferential interest rates. Even with reports of villager encroachment on their lands, in 2012, the company reported an income of around
470,000 USD from its plantation harvest.
Cot Coi, a small village in Tan Thanh commune, Huu Lung district,
was established in 2001. It was an offshoot of a larger neighboring
village, populated by Tay and Nung ethnic minorities.3 In addition to
these ethnic minority groups, the population of Cot Coi was also joined
by retrenched (lowland Kinh) workers from the Huu Lung forest enterprise in 2005. Before the establishment of Cot Coi, the surrounding area
had been farmed by neighboring Tay and Nung villagers, who had
cleared land near streams for paddy rice and on the neighboring hills
for swidden. When the government established Huu Lung enterprise
in the 1960s, management rights for this forestland were assigned to
the enterprise, disregarding villagers' existing claims. At that time,
many villagers continued to work the lands they regarded as their
3
Vietnam has 54 ethnic groups with Kinh as the largest ethnicity group that dominated
the lowland and accounts for 80% of the country's 87 million people as the total population. Tay and Nung are the two ethnic minorities, with their population totaling about 3
million (General Statistics Ofce, 2012). Most of the Tay and Nung live in the northern part
uplands.

own. On the ground, the enterprise did not actively prevent swidden
cultivation, which gave the villagers a degree of exibility in working
the land.
In time, when Cot Coi village was established, the district PC requested
that the company allocate land to the villagers for housing and cultivation. In response, the company gave each household about 0.30.4 ha of
land. However, the land was not productive due to a lack of water;
some households grew cassava and fruit trees, but others left the land
idle. As more retirees from the company settled in the village, they too required land. Some took seemingly unused areas of land that had water
access to cultivate paddy rice. Others bought paddy land from neighboring villages near Cot Coi. Many went into the forest to appropriate areas
that were not actively used by the company. Land conicts occurred as
a result of overlapping claims between the company on the one hand
and local people including the company's former workers on the other
hand. We describe these conicts below.
Cot Coi villagers face a shortage of productive land: 25% of village
households have no access to forestland (i.e. land formerly used for
swidden cultivation) and 17% are without access to paddy land. To
earn a living, many villagers now travel to the neighboring province as
hired farm or construction labor (earning 710 USD per day). However,
these jobs are seasonal and the income unstable. Our household data
reveals that 73% of the households in the village lack rice for up to six
months each year.
Cot Coi households reported that the strong market for acacia and
constraints in cash income motivated them to nd plantation land.
One obvious option was to encroach on the land now claimed by
Dong Bac company, particularly the areas where the company had
not yet planted trees. Consequently, villagers currently cultivate
some 42% of the company's land. After the company harvested its
trees, villagers moved onto the land to plant their own trees. Some
boldly claimed the land before harvest, in order to clear bushes and
grass for future cultivation after harvest. A small group even went
so far as to sabotage the company's seedlings to make the room for
their own trees.
Villager encroachment onto company land has triggered conicts,
with frequent quarrels reported between villagers and the company's
management division. Many villagers have voiced their frustration
and anger to the village headmen and commune ofcials. On occasion,
villagers have written joint letters of complaint to the chairman of the
commune PC and the company's director. At other times, they have
traveled to the commune PC ofce and asked the chairman to work
with the company to get them more land. Land conicts in Cot Coi
occur on a daily basis. A company ofcial in charge of land in Cot Coi
explained: We are very busy dealing with local people [about land
conict] it is our daily work. (Interview, November 2012).
Cot Coi's land conicts have been particularly problematic for
commune and district authorities. A vice chairman of the commune
PC supervising Cot Cot complained: We are very tired; we receive
many petitions from villagers. Addressing land conicts consumes 70
percent of my time. Look at my le [pointing to a bulging le in his ofce]
most of these documents are related to land conicts. My primary job is to
address these conicts. (Interview, November 2012). Although the 2003
Land Law limits the role of local authorities at village and commune
level to one of conict mediation and advice, villagers expect more.
One difculty is the power asymmetry between the company, backed
by Vinafor a powerful state entity on the one hand and villagers
and local authorities on the other hands. When conict occurs, the company relies on the Land Law to defend their formal land rights, accusing
local people of violating these. Invoking a state ethic of care, from which
state corporations are now excused, the company has tried to pressure
local authorities at the village and commune to solve the problem.
The villagers are yours, you have to address the problem. (The company's
director speaking to the chairman of the commune PC, November
2012). In this situation, local authorities at village, commune and district
level are caught between villagers and the company.

Please cite this article as: To, P.X., et al., A new landlord (a ch mi)? Community, land conict and State Forest Companies (SFCs) in Vietnam,
Forest Policy and Economics (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2014.10.005

P.X. To et al. / Forest Policy and Economics xxx (2014) xxxxxx

In spite of its formal power via land use certicates and connections with the central state the company has been unable to prevent
villagers from using land under its control. Rather than coercively restrict access, the company has tried to calm villagers by institutionalizing their access to the land through mechanisms that also secure a
share of revenues for the company. One such arrangement is a jointventure (lin doanh), in use since 2009. Under lin doanh, the company
allows villagers to plant acacia on encroached land, but villagers must
return a share of harvest proceeds to the SFC. Lin doanh resembles
the share-cropping arrangements of the colonial era. But unlike its colonial predecessor, the company covers some of the villagers' cultivation
costs. In Cot Coi, three different types of lin doanh exist, which provide
higher returns to the company where they invest more on agricultural
inputs.
Lin doanh have become a source of tension between villagers and
the company, particularly in relation to the level of return required by
the company relative to villagers. Villagers complained that they
would be unable to achieve the required payments to the company,
let alone gaining any benets for themselves. When we asked what
would happen if the harvest is lower than expected, one villager said,
I will ask the company to take the trees leaves. I have no more than that
to pay. (Interview, November 2012). Meanwhile the company director
answered if the villagers could not meet the agreed level of return,
villagers would have to sell their houses to compensate. (Interview,
November 2012). The director saw lin doanh as a business contract
a legally binding arrangement where villagers took on a risk. Indeed,
the contract effectively guaranteed benets to the company while passing on all of the risks to villagers; for instance, if young trees were lost to
disease or physical damage, the lin doanh contract would still require a
payment from the villagers to the company.
The lin doanh has come to be viewed by the villagers as an exploitative mechanism, and is a major reason for their labeling of the
company as a new landlord. Ofcials from village, commune and
district PC shared this view. The chairman of the district PC stated explicitly: There is nothing left for the villagers after they pay the company.
The company is holding the handle of a knife and the villagers are holding
the blade. This is really a form of exploitation. (Interview, November
2012). In spite of their concerns about exploitation, many Cot Coi
villagers still entered lin doanh agreements to gain legal access to
land, and in the hope that access would endure after harvest. As one villager said: One we've obtained the [lin doanh] contract, there is no way
the company can kick us off the land. (Villager, November 2012). Meanwhile the company saw the contract as a legitimate legal arrangement.
In sum, land conicts in Cot Coi have a number of triggers. They
occur in the context of increasing demand for land, triggered by markets
for timber. Village land is also in short supply for newly-established
households. Beyond the lack of land, villagers have a strong sense of
injustice vis--vis the company. They believe that the company has
captured a vast tract of land, but production on this land rests upon
their labor. Villagers with limited or no landholdings have no choice
but to either encroach on company land or participate in a lin doanh
arrangement. Villagers test the SFC's power through informal direct
occupation as well as entering lease arrangements with the intent of
achieving longer-term land occupation.
4.3. The conict between Long Dai Forest Company and Khe Cat villagers,
Quang Binh Province
Long Dai Forest Enterprise was established in 1981, and became
Long Dai Forest Company in 2005, and is under the control of the provincial PC of Quang Binh. The company controls 89,000 ha of production
forest, of which 61,000 ha is natural forest, and the rest is plantation. As
the government permits the extraction of high value timber from
natural forests, the company harvested 8500 m3 in 2011. In 2012 the
company earned about 15 million USD from selling timber and resin.
Despite Decree 200 mandating SFCs to return land to the provincial PC

for village distribution, Long Dai failed to comply. The company maintains its production by employing around 1000 people with an
additional 1500 part-time workers on seasonal contracts. VNFOREST
considers Long Dai to be a model SFC for its Forest Stewardship Council
certication4 and healthy prots. The company maintains that local
conicts are almost non-existent, affecting only 63 ha of its land; one
of these conict sites is Truong Son commune, the location of Khe Cat
village.5
In 2012, Khe Cat had a population of 303 people across 77 households, all of whom were Bru-Van Kieu ethnic minorities.6 About 70%
of households were classied as poor, with incomes well below the
country's average poverty rate. When the rst households came to
Khe Cat in 1972, they cleared land near tracks or water to grow cassava
and swidden rice. When the Long Dai Forest Enterprise was established,
it was given a substantial forest area to manage, including all of the
villagers' swidden land. In 1996, after the enterprise secured its land
use certicate for the area, it prevented villagers from accessing their
former lands. Rather than resisting, most villagers searched for farm
land in other forest areas or close to home. In 2003, with state subsidies,
Long Dai planted acacia trees on previously cleared land, including areas
close to Khe Cat. Lacking labor, the enterprise hired the villagers, promising them a share of the harvest. Once the trees were planted, however,
the company restricted villagers from continued forest access.
In 2005, the construction of a new road brought major change to Khe
Cat, providing villagers with new opportunities to access commercial
modern goods. The road allowed the villagers to take more timber
from Long Dai's natural forest an activity that enhanced household
incomes. In time, however, population expansion and land shortages reinforced poverty in Khe Cat. While households once had small paddies
and plots of land, major ooding destroyed most plots and paddy elds
had little to no irrigation potential. In response, villagers grew beans and
peanuts in drier areas, which amounted to only 5 ha for the entire
village. Upland forest resources thus remained important to local
livelihoods. Village interviews showed that the average annual household income from cassava is 6070 USD, and from rattan 1015 USD.
Timber from natural forests, however, was the most signicant income
source according to the household survey: nearly all Khe Cat households
had male adults engaged in logging, with each person earning on
average 25 USD per month.
In 2007, Long Dai SFC started to harvest the acacia trees planted in
2003, but planned against sharing the harvest with Khe Cat villagers
on the basis that they had already been paid for their labor. However,
villagers demanded a share from the harvest, citing their additional
labor invested in tree planting and protection. Taking matters into
their own hands, in 2009, 17 households sold trees on company land
to a district buyer for 1500 USD. When the buyer came to fell the
trees, the company tried to stop him, using its land use certicate to
assert their legal rights. Unable to complete their sale, the villagers
then organized to impede the company's harvest and sale of the same
trees. In the end, neither the company nor the villagers could harvest
the trees. Moreover, although the company could harvest trees that
were not planted by the villagers, the villagers acted to restrict the
company's ability to replant after harvest by claiming and planting the
land with their own cassava. When a Long Dai staff member asked a
cassava farmer in Khe Cat: Who allows you to plant cassava on our
land? the villager lifted his shirt and pointed to his belly saying, my
stomach allows me. We have nothing to eat. (Interview, December
2012).
High demand for acacia has further heightened tensions in Khe Cat.
In 2010, four households in Khe Cat earned up to 3500 USD from selling

4
Draft report on assessment of SFCs submitted to the Ofce of Government in June
2013.
5
The Company's report 394 dated 25 October 2012.
6
Bru-Van Kieu is one of Vietnam's ethnic minority groups. Their current population is
about 3 million, most of whom live in Quang Binh and some neighboring provinces.

Please cite this article as: To, P.X., et al., A new landlord (a ch mi)? Community, land conict and State Forest Companies (SFCs) in Vietnam,
Forest Policy and Economics (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2014.10.005

P.X. To et al. / Forest Policy and Economics xxx (2014) xxxxxx

acacia trees they had planted near their homes, a substantial gure for a
village with otherwise very low incomes. Learning from this, and with
encouragement from timber buyers and woodcutters, more villagers
claimed land from the company for tree planting. In the area near Khe
Cat, some 59 ha of land were contested as Khe Cat villagers' encroachment into the company's land for planting cassava and acacia.
Commune and district PCs have struggled to manage the land conict in Khe Cat, despite villagers' appeals. Initially, the commune PC
did not take villagers' concerns seriously, emphasizing that they had
no legal rights to the land. Over time, villagers' pressure on the commune PC intensied. In 2010, when the commune PC held a vote for
local ofcials, all the villagers in Khe Cat chose not to vote. The villagers'
refusal to vote shocked the commune and district PCs, in a sense
reecting the villagers' rejection of the state. The commune PC
responded to the voting boycott rapidly, sending a senior ofcial of
the same ethnic background as the Khe Cat villagers to persuade them
to participate in the elections, and promised to address villagers'
concern over land shortage more seriously. After this, the commune
PC invited Khe Cat leaders to a meeting to hear their concerns, as well
as visiting the sites of conict. This consultation yielded a report for
the district PC, which recognized the role of land shortage in triggering
land conict in the village. The report appealed for the provincial PC and
Long Dai company to address the villagers' land shortage. Nongovernment organizations (NGOs) then entered the fray, aiming to
mediate the land conict. Villagers sought to strengthen their land
claims by working with an NGO in the district township, which was
networked with other NGOs working on land tenure issues. In this
way, the NGO could get information on national land tenure discussions,
and with the Democracy Act,7 could provide villagers, commune and
district ofcials with relevant information, delivered through training
workshops. The NGO invited a National Television team to Khe Cat to
record villagers concerns about land issues, resulting in a 30-minute
documentary aired in 2012, that generated considerable interest
amongst policy makers at different levels of government and public at
large. In May 2012, the NGO took key villagers from Khe Cat, as well
as commune and district ofcials to a workshop on land conicts in
Hanoi. These processes led to public criticism of the company and a
stronger imperative for it to allocate land back to the villagers.
Under pressure, the company nally agreed to return 500 ha of land
to the villagers substantially less than the villagers' requested
3100 ha. Furthermore, not all of the land returned to the villagers
could be brought into use, as it was infertile or was difcult to access.
Struggles over land continued to bubble along at the time of research.
5. Discussion and Conclusions
Vietnam's reforms toward privatization and market liberalization
have created complex hybrid state-private entitiesincluding SFCs.
These SFCs are state-aligned, while also being engaged in evolving
land-based commodity markets and competing directly with local communities for cultivable land. In addition to the increased social differentiation and landscape change associated with these markets (Sikor and
Nguyen, 2005), these cases highlight their role in land conict. In Cot Coi
and Khe Cat, the combination of rapid market expansion together with
changing governance of SFCs has contributed to the protracted nature of
these land conicts. Although land conicts existed prior to the SFC governance reforms, this recent spate of conicts is exhibiting important
differences to prior ones. Current SFCs operate as hybrid market actors,
embracing the idea of state control and prot maximization; these SFCs
compete with local communities over land intended for the production
of cash crops for global markets. This contrasts with the previous developmental and logging role of SFEs, which was effectively an extension of
7

The Democratic Act passed by the National Assembly in 2005 mandated the commune
PC to be transparent to local people on the issues local people need to know, discuss and to
decide.

state control into upland frontiersthe consolidation of the socialist

state.
As a market actor operating on the principle of prot maximization,
SFCs have adopted two mechanisms for retaining the land. First, they
have resisted the state's requirement to allocate some of their land to
local communities. Second, to cope with their lack of labor and capital,
SFCs use their formal title documents to enter new lease arrangements,
and also hire villagers as laborers. Under these arrangements, SFCs secure a large share of the harvest, while villagers gain a much smaller
share. Villagers with limited or no landholdings have little choice but
to enter into such arrangements, with their limited returns. The
relationship between the company and villagers thus takes on an
exploitative tone. It is these unequal arrangements that underpin
the new landlord narrative, a term which echoes exploitative sharecropping arrangements under colonialism; the term new is used
since the old landlord system was abolished by the government during
its 1950s land reforms. Although the state has partially divested itself
from SFCs, at least in nancial terms, villagers cannot disentangle the
stateSFC relationship so clearly; they see their new landlord as an
arm of the state, and one with diminished legitimacy in their eyes,
because of its role in sustaining social inequality and exploitation.
The new landlord narrative also has wider ramications. The cycle
of land retention and exploitation of village labor by SFCs observed in
our two cases is not something that was countenanced at Vietnam's independence or when state enterprises were established. With their historical and enduring networks into the central state, SFCs are well
positioned to capture the benets of land use and labor contracts. The
irony that this new landlord is a former state entity is not lost on the
villagers, particularly when the state previously gained its legitimacy
amongst rural people on the promise of equal access to land for all
(Ho-Tai and Sidel, 2013). The term new also highlights the changing
signicance of commodity markets. Thus, although the state has
attempted to step back from its creation the newly reformed SFC
it remains bound to and identied with it partly due to intensifying
market conditions. Hearing the language of new landlord in the
media is deeply uncomfortable for central state actors as the term
delegitimizes state authority,8 as it challenges the precept of egalitarian
land distribution. The resulting lack of state legitimacy is evident when
villagers questioning its authority to mediate property claims. These
land conicts thus highlight both the contingent and limited nature of
state authority and how SFCs are contributing to diminished state
legitimacy.
Furthermore, internal fractures were emerging between central
state actors and the local state (village, commune and district level
leadership in particular). Kerkvliet (2004) notes that local leaders who
aspire for positions at higher levels of administrative authorities are
concerned to please authorities more than the people, whereas local ofcials tend to be more responsive to local concerns. This is supported by
both case studies, where villagers gained the sympathy of commune
and district PCs. The villagers brought this about through their threatened boycott of local elections. The resulting tensions between local
and central state actors add to a growing body of evidence about fractures between different levels of state administration (Sikor 2004;
Mahanty and Dang, in press).
The results also contribute to wider understandings of how state
power and legitimacy are moderated in specic contexts (Migdal,
2001; Sharma and Gupta, 2009). In this study, markets played an important role in reducing state authority, serving to intensify existing challenges to the central state as a facilitator of land access and control.
Hall et al. (2011:17) have observed similar processes in other parts of
Southeast Asia. Acacia and cassava markets have been particularly
8
The rst author of this paper received strong criticism from some senior government
ofcials when he cited the term new landlord for his report on land conict written in
Vietnamese language. One of them said that the term itself may call villagers to protest
for land.

Please cite this article as: To, P.X., et al., A new landlord (a ch mi)? Community, land conict and State Forest Companies (SFCs) in Vietnam,
Forest Policy and Economics (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2014.10.005

P.X. To et al. / Forest Policy and Economics xxx (2014) xxxxxx

signicant in the Vietnamese uplands. On the one hand, these markets

have prompted local actors to seek access to land and, through this, to
expanded livelihood opportunities. On the other hand, they have encouraged the SFCs to hold on to land and accumulate capital through
their contractual arrangements with local villagers in exclusionary
ways. While trying to remain at arms-length the state remains closely
involved in markets through SFCs.
In sum, although the Vietnamese state claims to have more or less
completed their work on property reforms (Sikor, 2012), the prevalence
of land conicts between SFCs and local people highlights continuing
challenges and frictions at the level of state representations and practices (Sharma and Gupta, 2009), and between different levels of state
administration. Conicts occur through the interplay of different claims
on land, based on diverse foundations to legitimize particular actors'
claims. In this sense, land conicts represent instances where the claims
and authority of the state in relation to land, as well as its coherence of
image and representation come under question, as villagers push back
both at the local and national levels through their strong resistance to
SFCs. The emergence of SFCs as a new landlord constituted by the
state and motivated by commercial imperatives has many local and
visible implications in terms of livelihoods and statesociety relations.
In the longer term, land conicts may prove to be an important driver
of change, both for land allocation policies and the future reform of
state owned enterprises including SFCs.
Acknowledgments
We thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
This paper is based on research supported by Forest Trends. Aspects of
this research were supported by the Australian Research Council
Discovery Project (DP120100270) The Political Ecology of Forest
Carbon: Mainland Southeast Asia's New Commodity Frontiers? The
rst author received logistical support during eldwork from the
Consultancy on Development Institute (CODE) in Vietnam. The views
expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent
those of the funders.
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Please cite this article as: To, P.X., et al., A new landlord (a ch mi)? Community, land conict and State Forest Companies (SFCs) in Vietnam,
Forest Policy and Economics (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2014.10.005