August 21, 1970
Page 29722
Mr. PACKWOOD. Mr. President, I support the statement of the distinguished senior Senator from Washington (Mr. MAGNUSON) concerning land reform in South Vietnam.
I am a strong support of the South Vietnamese land of the tiller program. For the past decade and a half, a number of Americans, beginning with the late President Eisenhower, have spoken of the need for such a program.
The land of the tiller program is designed to transfer the ownership of approximately 2½ to 3 million acres of land to some 1 million tenant and refugee families. I am convinced that this will give the tenant farmers, who comprise one-third of the total population of South Vietnam, a lasting stake in their Government.
But this program must be speedily implemented: By giving the peasants a stake in the preservation of their country, rapid implementation of land reform offers the possibility of a significant shift in peasant allegiance. toward the Central Government.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the RECORD an article I wrote, last year for the Ripon Society Forum, outlining the urgent need for land reform not only in South Vietnam,but in other quarters of the world.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
LAND REFORM: THE PEACEFUL REVOLUTION
Over the past 60 years, four great civil wars have erupted and claimed over a million lives apiece in Mexico, beginning in 1910; in Russia, starting in 1917; in China, beginning in the 1920s; and in Vietnam starting in 1945 – with an even more virulent phase beginning about 1960. Each of these was essentially a peasant revolt.
The Mexican Revolution was reformist but largely non-ideological, and it created one of Latin America’s most politically stable and economically progressive regimes. The other three uprisings occurred under Communist banners, and brought into play successively greater degrees of American involvement – culminating in the tragedy of Vietnam, which has thus far cost nearly 40,000 American lives and more than 100 billion American dollars.
But for all our knowledge about these peasant revolutions, we have not fully understood what has happened and why. And I fear that until we do, we are doomed to repeat our Vietnam experience again and again.
RURAL REVOLT
Let us first be sure that we understand the largely agrarian nature of these revolutions: Mexico, in, 1910, was two-thirds rural, with 95 percent of its rural population living as landless peons or as sharecroppers. The spark of revolution came after the Indians’ last remaining lands had been seized by speculators, when a presidential candidate offered to give back the land. Zapata accepted the offer.
Russia, in 1917, was 80 percent rural. Roughly three out of every five rural families were landless. And, though Karl Marx had written in the Communist Manifesto of the "idiocy of rural life," one of Lenin’s two great decrees in the first week of the October Revolution vested immediate ownership of all land in those who actually tilled it. Without the peasants’ support of the revolution, the ensuing civil war would have had a different result.
China, beginning in 1927, was the scene of Mao’s explicit break with the Marxist concept of revolution based on the urban industrial proletariat, and of his effort to fashion a peasant revolt. With an 80 percent rural population, three-quarters of which was landless, China was ripe for revolution. Chiang Kai-shek’s efforts to fight Mao’s land reform with military hardware lost a nation of half a billion people in two decades.
Vietnam, from 1945 on, saw an application of much the same tactics that had succeeded in China. In the Viet Minh stage, the promise of land to the tiller was effectively tied to a nationalist revolution. Here again, 80 percent of the population was rural, and the bulkof that segment was substantially landless (tenant farming accounted for around 50 percent in the central and northern reaches, and for nearly 75 percent in the populous Mekong Delta). The prognosis for revolution was again excellent.
A DOZEN VIETNAMS
Today there are dozens of Mexicos and Russias and Chins and Vienams in the making.
Three-fifths of the total population of the developing nations is rural, and a staggering percentage of these people are landless laborers or tenant farmers. In places like Vietnam, these farmers may pay one-third to one-half of their tiny crop in rent every year to an absentee landlord. In return, they are granted no security of tenure whatever. Or, if their situation is like that of laborers on Latin American plantations, they may make $15.00 a month to feed and clothe a whole family.
These discontented peasants are searching for a better life and wherever the Communists offer it, they rush to the Communist banner.
A paradox arises, however, when one considers further our four great revolutions. The Mexicans kept their promise; they redistributed half the crop land in the country, so that 75 percent of the rural families now own their own land. The pleased peasants not only have refrained from overthrowing a Mexican government for half a century, but they have also more than tripled their agricultural production since the 1930s, and their higher incomes have fueled the growth of urban industry to supply consumer goods and agricultural inputs. A similar promise was made and kept in Bolivia – with less bloodshed – and made and kept without any revolution at all in Japan, Taiwan (ten years too late), South Korea, and Iran. Such a promise has recently been made in Peru.
UNKEPT PROMISES
But the Russians, Chinese, and North Vietnamese didn’t keep their promises; once the revolution had succeeded, they launched into a second stage of "land reform," which involved the collectivization of holdings under the state as a kind of super-landlord. The Russian "land reform" killed or deported millions; the Chinese killed 800,000 or more; the North Vietnamese, 50,000 to 100,000. This was the "land reform" path also followed by the Cubans.
And the peasants’ unhappiness with the arrangements in these countries could be detected in their drastically reduced productivity. Russia took until 1953 to return to its 1928 (pre-collectivization) level of agricultural production. China is about even now. Taiwan, by contrast, has doubled its rice production since the land to the family farmer reform has begun. Cuba is still behind the pre-Castro level.
Thus, we have a rather strange set of facts:
1. Mexico, Japan and other countries have carried out massive land reform basically on the family farm pattern and have reaped the twin benefits of long-term political stability and a sustained increase in production.
2. Russia, North Vietnam, and other countries that have ruthlessly collectivized the land have secured a consistently miserable production record from their sullen peasants.
3. Nonetheless, those who call themselves Communists have been able in much of the developing world – including Vietnam and Latin America – to hold themselves out as the genuine agrarian reformers.
AN EFFECTIVE ALTERNATIVE
The problem, it seems to me, is that the United States has not effectively offered an alternative, and until we do, we will be faced with a continuous series of Vietnam-type crises built on peasant unrest around the world. Our alternative is; land reform – broad land reform, with fair compensation to the landowners, that gives the great mass of peasants a stake in their society and an incentive to produce. Land reform eradicates the key appeal that has been used in starting "wars of national liberation", and it can "revolution-proof" the developing world against such enticements, as it has most notably done for the Bolivian peasant against the call of Che Guevara, and for the South Korean peasant against the efforts of the North to start a behind-the-lines "peoples war." There is no sounder, higher priority use of our foreign aid dollar than in the reform of land tenure. We must think in terms of four related ideas in order to use that land reform dollar most effectively and with maximum leverage:
1. Information. We are woefully short of detailed data on the land reform problem around the world. Too many political officers in overseas embassies send back their assessments of rural unrest based on what they have heard at English-speaking, urban cocktail parties, instead of on what they have observed while bounding along back roads in a jeep.
In Latin America, a preliminary assessment based on non-government scholarship indicates that countries on the "critical list," as prime candidates for peasant based revolutions over the next decade or so include Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, and most of Central America. In Asia, the list includes the Philippines, Indochina, India, Pakistan, and Nepal. Systematic gathering of comparative data on tenancy, agricultural labor, land values, credit needs, and related matters in these and other developing countries should be initiated at once.
2. Compensation. In most nations, politically viable, non-revolutionary land reform programs must first assuage the landlords’ doubts that the bonds they receive for their property will ever be paid off. To resolve these doubts, a central element in our land reform strategy should be the creation of a multilateral agency to act as guarantor of land reform bonds issued by individual countries. Under such a plan, the U.S. could pledge one dollar to the capital of such an agency for every dollar (or two dollars) put up by other developed countries and for corresponding, though lesser, amounts put up by the developing nation.
E.G., NORTHEAST BRAZIL
Brazil, for example, badly needs a land reform program in its teeming Northeast, where 70 percent of the 30 million population is rural and 70 percent of that element is landless. According to a preliminary estimate, it would cost about $1 billion to carry out such a program over a period of seven to ten years. If the Brazilians wanted help – and most of the nations in Brazil’s position are desperate to find a way out consistent with not bringing their governments crashing down – they would enter into an agreement with the insuring fund. For an approved plan (one giving the bulk of its benefits to the landless tenant and plantation worker), the fund would guarantee the principal and interest of the land reform bonds to be issued.
The chief source of bond retirement would be a sinking fund established under agreed upon rules, into which the peasants would make payments for their land over a period of perhaps 15 years. Meanwhile, the original landowners would know that the international community stood behind the bonds (which, however, they would be allowed and encouraged to transform into needed noninflationary capital goods from the start).
Very preliminary calculations suggest that $1 billion of land reform in Brazil could be bought at a net outlay by the U.S. – through the international fund – of only, $100 to $200 million. For the above-named "critical" countries as a group, preliminary data suggest that land reform with a gross cost of some $6 to $8 billion would likely "revolution-proof" most of the developing world for the next couple of decades, and that the net cost to the U.S.– through the fund – would probably be less than $2 billion, or what it costs us to fight in Vietnam for a month,
3. Credit. The fund should also be a vehicle for credit and supporting services to the smallest farmers. Too much U.S. agriculture credit assistance – including that for the "miracle" rice and wheat programs – appears to be going to the solid, traditionally credit-worthy farmer, and not to benefitting the masses of rural poor in any way. (Even if more rice is produced, they still can’t afford to buy it.) Credit might be generated partly by fund guarantees to commercial banks, and partly by direct establishment of a revolving fund to be replenished by peasant repayments. For the "critical" countries, this package of supporting services might come to a further $3 to $4 billion with a net U.S. outlay of less than $1 billion.
4. Bilateral aid. In a few spots, notably Vietnam, our support for land reform will have to be quick and bilateral. The failure to carry out land reform sooner is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the whole Vietnam involvement. Fortunately, the Vietnamese at least seem to be moving strongly on a radically simplified, sweeping land reform program, with a total cost of $400 to $500 million (no peasant repayment, since we are competing with a purportedly "free" Viet Cong program). The U.S. should bear as much of this as needed – the whole amount is a week’s cost of the war – to keep the program moving fast.
AVOIDING NEW TRAGEDIES
In certain proximate countries, like Panama or the Dominican Republic, a few tens of millions for land reform now may help avoid tragedy in the 1970s, and strategic considerations may suggest immediate bilateral assistance.
In summary, with the right priorities and with imaginative programs, and at a total cost of perhaps $3 billion spread over a decade or more, the U.S. can become the "champion" of land reform; help bring about markedly increased political stability in the developing world; and help motivate a marked increase in agricultural production.
For a tiny fraction of what it has cost us in Vietnam, the United States can buy insurance against future Vietnams, and can bring a higher standard of living and a more meaningful existence to millions of people whose lives are now more reminiscent of the Middle Ages than the 20th Century.
Mr. PACKWOOD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that there be printed in the RECORD a statement prepared by the Senator from Maine (Mr. MUSKIE) and the article entitled, "Real Land Reform Comes to Vietnam," as requested by Senator MUSKIE.
There being no objection, the statement and article were ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
REAL LAND REFORM COMES TO VIETNAM
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, during the past year I have spoken several times on the great importance of United States support for a comprehensive program of land reform in South Vietnam. I join today with Senators Magnuson and Packwood in reemphasizing the broad implications which such a program can have for termination of the conflict in Vietnam.
It is clear that whatever policy the United States pursues in disengaging from this war, an increasing burden and responsibility must fall upon the South Vietnamese themselves. It is also clear that this responsibility must include broadening the base of support for the central government, whoever may be at the head of that government.
The fighting and killing in Vietnam can never be brought to an end without a political settlement of some sort. That settlement must necessarily be based on winning the support of the Vietnamese peasant, who today has little stake in the future of his country.
A successful land reform program offers a unique possibility for winning this support.
It could provide the incentive necessary to stabilize the political situation in South Vietnam. As Senator Magnuson and Senator Packwood have pointed out in their remarks, the promise of land tenure has been a key weapon in revolutionary movements during this century; Vietnam is no exception.
In the August 9 edition of the Baltimore Sun there was an article on land reform by Professor Roy Prosterman, who has been very influential in the development of the Land to the Tiller bill signed into law in March, 1970, by President Thieu. Professor Prosterman has provided a thoughtful and concise analysis of the historical background leading up to the present program of land reform, which President Thieu initiated. In commenting on the significance of this program and the failure of the Diem regime to carry out land reform in the 1950s, Professor Prosterman states that, "indeed, if the Communists had been deprived of their chief selling point in the South Vietnamese countryside, through effective land reform, it is probably true that there never would. have been a war.”
Turning to the possible impact of a successful land reform effort, Professor Prosterman further states that for the first time, Saigon has the opportunity to "come to grips with the focal issue in the countryside, the one that has supplied the chief Viet Cong appeal to the peasantry."
I urge my colleagues to consider the arguments presented in this article. Land reform in Vietnam is long overdue. The United States must provide its full encouragement and support for implementation of this program as rapidly as possible, if the impact of land reform is to be fully realized.
REAL LAND REFORM COMES To VIETNAM
(By Roy L. Prosterman)
An editorial in a major daily in late March called the new South Vietnamese land reform law “the most important news to come out of Vietnam since the end of the Japanese occupation."
They may not have exaggerated.
Lack of landownership among the peasantry formed a basic part of the Communist appeal in Russia, China and Cuba, so it should be no surpise that it has performed a parallel function in Vietnam in the hands both of the Viet Minh and the Viet Cong.
Tenant farming is the biggest occupation in South Vietnam, with close to a million Vietnamese families, or about 6 million people in a population of 17 million, dependent on it. The Mekong Delta, where about 70 per cent of the farm families are primarily dependent on farming tenanted land, has one of the highest proportions of tenant farmers in the world. The typical delta family lives on 3½ acres, pays a third of its crop to the landlord (who supplies no inputs of any description), rarely has any surplus beyond its immediate nutritional needs, is evictable at will and is held for the rent even in the case of crop failure. In Central Vietnam, the typical tract is 2 acres and the rent averages half the crop.
For years the Viet Minh and then the Viet Cong were allowed to hold themselves out to these people as land reformers, who would drive away their landlords and give them their land, while the successive Saigon governments were identified as pro-landlord.
DIEM’S DISASTER.
In retrospect, the most disastrous of all Ngo Dinh Diem’s policies in the late 1950s was probably that which promoted return to the landlords of the extensive lands purportedly distributed by the Viet Minh to the peasantry in the 1945-1954 period and reassertion of the landlords’ traditional rights over their former tenants. The promotion of this worse than useless program – with the cooperation of American advisers who were unwilling to push for the major land reform that our top policymakers wanted – was surely one of the preeminent disasters of postwar American foreign aid.
Diem’s failure to act was doubly tragic because the Communists in the North were carrying out their usual second-stage land reform – collectivization, as in Russia, China and later Cuba – which defeated most of the expectations that had led peasants to support the revolution. As elsewhere, collectivization was violent, unpopular and disastrous for production.
Diem might have looked, as an alternative for the South, toward any of the massive democratic land reforms that had already been carried out in the Twentieth Century in Mexico, Bolivia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. But Diem failed to profit by example. He stood with the landlords and we stood with Diem and as we moved into the 1960s the revived Communist movement was once more offering land to a population whose entire security and livelihood. were bound up with their relation to the soil.
Little wonder that the common recruiting appeal in wide areas where Viet Cong land reform was in effect was "the movement has given you land, give us your son," as it was put by Marine Lt. Col. William Corson in "The Betrayal." Or that the late Bernard Fall called land reform "as essential to success as ammunition for howitzers – in fact, more so."
Or that Douglas Pike, probably our leading authority on the Viet Cong, describes their indoctrination system as based on vested "interests in land."
Or that field interviewers in a 1967 Stanford Research Institute study found that Vietnamese tenant farmers named landownership five times as frequently as physical security as a thing of crucial concern to them.
Or that over half of those bearing arms against us in Vietnam, main force and guerrilla units taken together, are still today native South Vietnamese.
Or that over half of all American casualties in the past two years have been due to such essentially local guerrilla activities as planting mines and booby traps – the villagers then standing silent as we walk into them.
Or that virtually no main force activities could take place without the essential advance work done by the local villagers in carrying in and burying supplies and ammunition at intervals along the line of march toward the military objective.
Indeed, if the Communists had been deprived of their chief selling point in the South Vietnamese countryside through effective land reform, it is probably true that there never would have been a war. President Nguyen Van Thieu himself made substantially that observation in a speech given January 18, 1968.
The failure from 1955 – well into 1968 – to come to grips with this problem is so complete and so numbing that one must mentally prepare to receive the pleasant shock of the facts from recent months.
Now, at long last, the South Vietnamese government, under strong pressure from President Thieu and with newly firm American support, is preparing to offer the peasants as much as the Viet Cong have seemed to offer. Much more, in fact, for the Saigon land reform program is not meant to be followed by collectivization. Since coming to grips with the fundamental need for land reform in early1968, President Thieu has successfully pushed through five critical land reform measures.
FIVE MEASURES
1. At the end of 1968, he ended the incredible self-defeating practice by which landlords had been returning to reassert their “rights” to land, often riding into newly secured villages in South Vietnamese Army jeeps.
2. In April, 1969, he put a freeze on all rights to land occupancy, pending passage of new land reform legislation. Preliminary field observations have indicated this freeze to be well-publicized and quite effective.
3. In June, 1969, he began an accelerated distribution of government-owned lands free of charge. Since then, over 300,000 acres have been distributed to the benefit of nearly 100,000 former tenant farmer families.
4. In July, 1969, he presented the land to the tiller bill to the National Assembly. After a desperate fight against landlord interests and political opponents, the bill was passed in March
This measure, which the New York Times has editorially called "probably the most ambitious and progressive non-Communist land reform of the Twentieth Century" is the keystone of Mr. Thieu’s efforts. It embodies a drastically simplified program which will distribute virtually all tenanted land in the country to the present tillers free of charge and with fair payment by the government to the landlords. Ownership of over half the cultivated land in the country will change hands and a million tenant farmer families – a third of the nation’s population – will become full owners. The total price tag of about $400 million is equivalent to around five days’ cost of the war. U.S. support – in the form of productive commodities to generate piasters – for somewhere between a quarter and a half this amount will be asked from Congress in the coming months and it is to my mind undoubtedly one of the biggest bargains of the Vietnam War; preliminary measures have already been introduced in both houses with extremely broad bipartisan support.
5. Last June, he further simplified the program’s administration by decreeing an immediate end to all rents without formalities, such as Western-style land titles.
A number of factors have combined with the program’s enormous simplicity and the major results already achieved to give even the most jaded observers real hope that this package of measures will be largely effective by the next main harvest from December through February.
EXCELLENT PROSPECTS
There are excellent prospects that the great majority of South Vietnam’s million tenant farmer families will be free of rents they would otherwise pay and will regard themselves as definitely on the road to full ownership under policies sponsored by Saigon. Those living in Viet Cong controlled areas will consider themselves definitely freed from the prospect that Saigon’s control means the landlords’ return and confirmed in possession of the land they are tilling.
If Saigon can carry it off, what consequences can be expected? There would appear to be several – each of potentially far-reaching importance:
For the first time, Saigon will have successfully come to grips with the focal issue in the countryside, the one that has supplied the chief Viet Cong appeal to the peasantry. A significant spectrum shift in allegiance among Vietnam’s 6 million tenant farmer people can be expected in Saigon’s direction.
This shift will have not only a political dimension, but a significant military dimension. Notably, tenant farmers and sons of tenant farmers, who are the largest rank and file group in the South Vietnamese Army and in the local militia, are more likely to be motivated to fight if they have a stake in their society, which is probably of more fundamental importance to the success of "Vietnamization" than whether the recruit gets an M-16 to replace his M-1. Moreover, peasants who regard Saigon as the source of their landownership are more likely to take the risk of supplying intelligence. At the same time, the root of peasant motivation to support the Viet Cong in a variety of ways will be significantly weakened.
MIGHT HELP PARIS TALKS
The prospect of such a massive, grassroots shift in peasant support is one of the few things that can be visualized which might supply enough bargaining leverage to get the Paris talks moving again. Indeed, former Paris negotiator Cyrus Vance suggested last fall that the offer to hold back on implementation of the land reform in historically Viet Cong controlled areas could become a powerful bargaining lever once the land to the tiller bill had been passed.
Land reform, at last, and tragically late, appears to have come to Vietnam. But even at this date it is without exaggeration, one of the major events of the war.