The Costs of Development
By Cynthia Whitman
As I embarked on a four and a half month experience in Southeast Asia, based out of Hanoi, Vietnam’s largest northern city, I knew little of what to expect, and I liked it that way. If someone had told me I would be sitting on a five-inch tall plastic stool on a street corner, sipping local beer and eating dog meat with my Vietnamese language professor at 9 a.m. on a Thursday morning, I would have laughed it off. But it really did happen, and I loved every minute of it.
At five in the morning the city was bustling: people selling fresh fruit, dairy products, and various meats and fish at markets and on the street. My typical day began with a run around the lake in Reunification Park, listening to Cyndi Lauper on a loudspeaker, watching hundreds of Vietnamese women practice aerobics in small groups. Some were dancing with fans and still others sat by the lake selling bowls of pho, a traditional Vietnamese rice noodle soup. Men played badminton on sidewalks lined with chalk and I even found a group that had hopes of recruiting me for their morning team. For me, a "sinh to xoai," a mango smoothie, and some coffee were standard morning treats. Then I was off to class at the Vietnam National University campus south of the city in my neighborhood, Bach Khoa.
I was going for complete immersion. My contact with the non-Vietnamese world was limited—no phone calls for the whole semester. Life was simpler that way, and I was able to gain experiences in the most traditional sense. I was welcomed into people’s houses, and although I would never fit in with my tall stature, fair complexion, and blonde hair, Hanoi became my home. The drivers on the number 31 bus greeted me and even conversed with me as I practiced my new Vietnamese language skills. I visited museums dedicated to spreading Vietnamese nationalism and hiked around rural towns and beaches, trying to grasp what it means to live in a Socialist Republic. This was crucial to understanding Vietnam’s current economic status.
At Connecticut College, I am studying economics and have focused on the economics of development throughout the world. Going to Vietnam allowed me to see some current development efforts. Vietnam only gained independence and reunification in April of 1975, at the end of the American War, and the three decades since have been dedicated to the development that was unachievable during war. I studied Vietnamese language, culture, history, and political economy, but I also decided to work on an independent project. The goal of my study was to learn about the informal sector and Vietnam’s transition to a market economy.
It is important to look at individual countries, their successes and challenges, and their attempts to grow, in order to determine what long-term projects have been most productive throughout the developing world. I wrote one essay a week focusing on my personal experiences, interactions, readings, and information provided by my professors and the World Bank headquarters in Hanoi.
Since 1986, many reforms have been implemented to open Vietnam to free trade and encourage private economic investment. Through these reforms, referred to as “doi moi”—a set of reconstruction programs—the country has been able to undergo processes including decentralization of state management, a shift to a market-based economy, larger freedom for competition among private firms, and a more liberal system of trade, which in effect opened up much of the import-export market.
After studying this 20-year development period, the next step was going to the source. Vietnam is in transition, hoping to participate in trade with the most powerful countries in the world. This comes as a challenge, because not only does Vietnam need to become more efficient to even begin to compete on a global scale, but she also needs to adopt environmentally friendly industries in order to be accepted—a process costly for a nation whose per capita GDP is just shy of $400.
One of the areas I studied was the informal employment of roving street vendors in the larger cities in Vietnam. This system provides a supplemental income to families living in adjacent rural areas. The participants are predominantly women who pedal agricultural goods grown in their home villages. This income allows many households to remain at or above subsistence poverty levels ($135.60 U.S./annum) and reduces the instances of food-poor households.
Attempts to shut down these pedaling practices could result in catastrophic reparations to the current status of many of Vietnam’s rural residents and thus create excess rural-to-urban migration. I spoke to many peddlers in Hanoi to find out what they earn and where they live. Most still live with their families in villages outside of the city with no intention of moving, unless they become unable to make enough money to support their families. While the rural areas have not been developing at the same rate as the urban centers, vendor practices have provided enough supplemental income to enable people to remain in their villages and to farm rather than be forced into cities to make money.
Looking to the future, I found that the sustainable development of a significant rural industry beyond agriculture will serve as a lifeline to sustain rural life. Eighty percent of Vietnam’s population is rural and 72 percent of the active labor force is engaged in agriculture, while only about one-tenth of the workforce is employed through industry. Currently the largest rural industry in Vietnam is brick-making. The kilns produce black smoke, damaging the environment, but employing hundreds of workers. In an attempt to trade with the U.S. and other powerful countries, traditional kilns are slowly being replaced by higher capacity units that are more efficient and environmentally friendly. These new kilns will be able to produce bricks to meet the country’s demands and create a significant export market; however, one new kiln displaces approximately 300 workers. Being a predominantly labor-based economy, Vietnam faces challenges with employment unless another industry is created to meet demands. Sustainable agricultural practices are crucial to stability during a time when new industries are being introduced. Preserving an old practice while introducing a new one is a challenge for the nation whose foreign investment is geared toward urban development.
I headed up to a town called Sapa, in the northwestern mountains, to learn about rural poverty and seek out an area where I could observe traditional agricultural practices. Nestled in a valley near Indochina’s tallest peak, Fansipan, Sapa sits as a market center for the trading of clothing, vegetables, and meats. The villages are inhabited by ethnic minority tribes that have been suppressed for centuries by the Viet or Kinh, the ethnic majority group referred to as Vietnamese. The Black H’mong and White Thai tribes are the two predominant groups in Sapa. The mountains stand tall and untouched by 20th and 21st century development.
On a bus, minutes before our arrival at a bustling market, we hurdled to a stop. I looked out the front window only to see a ditch in front of the bus. My fellow passengers and I were sent into the woods to gather stones to rebuild the road that had been washed out by the previous night’s rainstorm. The country’s infrastructure improvements have not yet reached Sapa, but when I arrived at the market, I found that the women and children had been prospering from tourism.
Upon my arrival I met a H’mong girl named Mimi. She followed me around the town night and day, showing me her goods, trying to get me to buy earrings and clothing off her back. She held on to me, practicing her English and waiting for me in the mornings outside my hotel to guide me through the streets. She was 16 years old and had begun to give up on the idea of marriage. “If a girl is not married by 15, she is unlucky. I do not think anyone wants me for a wife,” she said. Shocked by this comment, I reassured her that there would be a man to come along and marry her. She seemed doubtful and planned on living in her mother’s house, taking care of her family. She grasped my hand and pulled me down the street to a local bar with two pool tables and a few tattered couches, where she challenged me to a game. Dressed in her traditional clothing and a pair of Nike’s, she picked up the pool cue, and ball after ball landed right in the pockets. The clash of cultures amazed me. I asked her if she had thought of traveling away from her village, to a city in Vietnam, to a city beyond that. She replied shortly, “I will never leave my village and my family.” Isolation is what keeps her traditional lifestyle so strong, but it is also what prevents her from becoming accepted in mainstream society, keeping her in poverty.
This situation presents an interesting paradox wherein traditional dedication to family is so strong that individuals would rather remain in the hills than flock to the cities where they could adapt to modern life and have access to basic amenities. I admired their dedication and wanted to remain in the mystical mountains where life was simple and the landscape raw and unique.
I left Sapa to visit another province closer to the border of Laos called Lai Chau. I embarked on a journey down the Dao River. The river is named after the stones that line its banks. My riverboat floated downstream to a small beach where I was instructed by my guide to disembark and continue along a dirt pathway. I was off to see a White Thai village. The spot was protected by steep mountain cliffs, however, in less than a year the village would be flooded to make way for the largest hydroelectric dam in Southeast Asia. The villagers would be forced to set out new plots for their terrace farming up the mountainside.
One woman invited me into her home after she saw me wandering around on the paths. We had no common language, for she spoke her native language, and I mumbled Vietnamese. She managed to relay to my guide that she was 47 and pregnant with her seventh child, while she clung to her sixth, who was still uneasy with his walking skills. Her husband was away hunting deer in the mountains, while her other children worked with a water buffalo preparing a field for seed. Traditional farming employs most members of these village communities. These practices, however, are inefficient on a global scale and only serve to provide food for family members. The power of modern machinery is taking over the agricultural export industry in less isolated locations, and these traditional practices will stagnate the future of a competitive export industry in isolated villages, while it provides half of the country’s GDP elsewhere.
I came away conflicted. On the two-day bus ride back to Hanoi, questions ran through my head of what Vietnam’s development goal should be. Should Vietnam strive to Westernize, or is too much history and culture lost in the process? I began to question what exactly was so negative about traditional farming and the simple way of life. I knew amenities such as healthcare and education were important, but I wondered whether development threatened family values and tradition. I began to make sense of it all when I thought about my own family and traditions, things I hold as important in my own life. I found that I am actually not much different from Mimi. While the way in which our everyday activities play out are poles apart, the values we hold are similar. I realized that in the face of development, going slowly and constantly re-evaluating projects can actually preserve values and create a strong society where history is not lost. Even with urbanization, the people of Vietnam worship their ancestors, showing an appreciation and dedication to their forefathers who fought to bring them the independence they now embrace.
At the time this was written, CYNTHIA WHITMAN was a double Economics and Urban Studies major at Connecticut College. She went to Vietnam with Connecticut College’s Study Away Teach Away program. Contact her at cbwhi@conncoll.edu.