Untold Stories

Vietnam: farm school

Stephanie Guyer-Stevens, for the Pulitzer Center with photographer Simon Dearnaley

Tu is 21 years old, and has just graduated from University studying agriculture. At Lanh's invitation, her family has moved from their village where they were growing commercial rice, onto the farm school property to start up a sort of model farm using only permaculture techniques. Back at home they grew wetland rice - the rice grown in big flat lowland paddies. Now they are in the mountains, they're struggling, because they don’t know how to grow upland rice - the kind of rice they grow here - in terraced fields. So they have to buy rice, and the new organic farm that they're just beginning to get going here doesn't provide them with anything left over to sell. Her mother and father are thinking about going back to their village where they can grow enough rice to feed their family, while she and her brother run the farm here. But they're a very close family. She would miss her parents so much if they had to do that.She's really worried, and starts to cry during our interview.It's been a hard move.

Vietnam: The Road to Cau Treo

Stephanie Guyer-Stevens, for the Pulitzer Center with photographer Simon Dearnaley

We return from Ke village well after dark. Where we're staying is closest to the village of Nuoc Sot, really nothing more than an intersection in the road, an army barracks, and a hot springs resort, which seems a bit overbuilt, considering the size of the local population. Soon we discover that we're only about 5km from the border crossing between Vietnam and Laos at Cau Treo, so the quiet road transecting this piece of land, primarily used by water buffaloes, is occasionally punctuated by a bus on its way to or from Laos, full of people, baggage and chicken cages strapped on top, careening around the switchbacks.

In the early morning, the forest looks like impenetrable jungle to my American eye, the river meandering along the border of the land here looks pristine. At dawn we see a man walking along the river with a fishing net. Every day before sunset we have seen water buffaloes slowly ambling down the shallow riverbeds with a log in tow. How picturesque, I think.

Vietnam: The Malieng

Stephanie Guyer-Stevens, for the Pulitzer Center with photographer Simon Dearnaley

On this side of the Ca Tang River we’re now in Ke village, home of about 70 Malieng families. The Malieng are the smallest ethnic group in Vietnam – about 1400 left in Vietnam, maybe another 1000 living in Laos. Traditionally they’re forest dwellers – hunter-gatherers, and practitioners of swidden agriculture. Also called slash and burn agriculture, swidden agriculture is almost universally decried as backwards, inefficient, and a grave obstacle to conservation, though none of these claims have ever been proven. What is true is swidden agriculture is most commonly practiced by migrant forest dwelling people, like the Malieng, many of whom traditionally inhabit cross-border regions. Here in Vietnam as in much of southeast Asia, eliminating swidden agriculture also eliminates unregulated cross border nomadism. The replacement is generally cash crop cultivation.

Vietnam: The Price of Rice

Stephanie Guyer-Stevens, for the Pulitzer Center. Photographs by Simon Dearnaley

It’s late morning, hot, cicadas are buzzing at full throttle already. Water buffaloes are slowly making their way down into the river. Dogs are sleeping in the shade beneath the bamboo. We’re well off the highway, having made our way in low gear down a steep rutted four wheel drive path, and we’re now at the river which the locals call Ca Tang. We’re about ten kilometers from the Laos border, and just north of the former DMZ – the demilitarized zone, the demarcation line  created between north and south Vietnam during what the Vietnamese call The American War. As the epicenter of the country, Quang Binh and Quang Tri provinces were the most heavily bombed and deforested provinces during the war, so now are the poorest provinces.

We’ve come here with staff from a Vietnamese NGO, SPERI, Social Policy Ecological Research Institute. I told them that we’ve really come to Vietnam to get a first hand understanding of the cause of the so called “Asian food crisis”, which has been ripping through the continent recently.