Taiwan Today

Because he planted soybeans, a crop new to Vietnamese farmers in the Mekong Delta, Nguyen Van Pham is sending a son to college this year.

Pham, 50, farms 15 hectares in Dong Thanh hamlet of My Thoi village in the Thot Not district of An Giang province. Work­ing in the fields with him are his wife, Bui Thi Cam, 45, and their seven children rang­ing in age from 8 to 27. This spring Pharo planted four-tenths of a hectare to soybeans. One hundred days later he harvested 720 kilos from his experimental plot and sold them for 36,000 piasters. That is a windfall equivalent to US$305—enough to start his son Nguyen Van Lon, 21, at Saigon University, where he is studying law. He is the first member of the family to go to college.

Pham learned about soybeans from a Chinese agricultural team working in An Giang under a project that represents cooperation among three countries. Govern­ments of the Republic of China, the Repub­lic of Vietnam, and the United States are working together to increase the income of farmers in Vietnam's rice granary.

Under an agreement between the Tai­pei and Saigon governments underwritten by the U.S. Agency for International Develop­ment (AID), the Chinese experts are teaching Vietnamese farmers how to get richer harvests by raising soybeans, transplanted rice, "yard-long" Chinese beans, and other crops strange to the region.

Funds for salaries and transportation of the experts from Taiwan are supplied by AID. Seed and agricultural tools are made available by AID and the An Giang agriculture service. The provincial service also provides the services of skilled Vietnamese personnel to work with the Chinese agricul­turists in the hamlets.

The eight Chinese on the team have been working in Vietnam for three years, but it was not until April, 1966, that Huang Chu-fong, a native of Taipei, brought his men to An Giang. The soil of the Delta province is fertile, but has not been returning all that it should to its hard-working, but tradition-minded farmers.

There are 142,000 hectares planted to rice in An Giang this year, but the strain is the "floating" rice variety—indigo, or red rice, which produces only one low-yield crop a year. The Chinese are traveling throughout An Giang to show farmers how the same amount of land devoted to more marketable and better yielding crops can produce 10 times as much income.

They demonstrated this conclusively in Thot Not district, where a hectare of land planted to floating rice produces about 1,500 kilos selling for 8 to 12 piastcrs a kilo and total income of 12,000 to 18,000 piasters. On that same hectare the Chinese produced 1,800 to 2,000 kilos of soybeans worth 50 piasters a kilo. At two crops a years, the return is 180,000 to 200,000 piasters an­nually.

Watermelons, Too

Among progressive farmers in Thot Not who volunteered the use of their land as demonstration plots was Le Van Thiet, 54, a tenant farmer whose family has been living in Lan Thanh II hamlet of Trung Nhut village for six generations. There, four kilometers from the town of Thot Not, Thiet, his wife Do Thi Hoa, 47, their two sons and their daughter have just harvested a soybean crop that attracted three to four neighboring farm­ers a day. The neighbors came to watch, ask questions, and finger the beans.

Thiet and his family planted one-tenth of a hectare to floating rice and one-tenth to soybeans. After the harvest, they pocketed 1,500 piasters from the rice crop and 8,000 piasters from the soybeans.

"I cannot plant floating rice again this year because it takes six months to grow," said Thiet. "But in November I will plant another crop of soybeans. This second crop I can harvest within 90 days—10 days less than the growing period for my spring crop. So the 8,000 piasters I got for the first crop of soybeans will be doubled. Next year I'll plant six-tenths of a hectare to soybeans and one-tenth to watermelons."

Thiet had seen a watermelon demonstration plot at Can Tho. He learned that the Sugar Baby variety of watermelon from Taiwan, so popular among Vietnamese at the annual Tet festival, can give farmers 90 times the amount they earn from floating rice.

Thiet's demonstration plot has led to the establishment of five groups of farmers in his village. With 20 men in each group, they will be taught how to plant and market soy­beans. Some of their land will produce a soybean crop early in 1967.

Eight kilometers north of Thot Not town, in Thai Thanh hamlet of Thoi Thuan village, the Chinese agriculturists persuaded farmer Phan Van Quoi, 65, to plant another type of demonstration plot. Most of his five hectares of rented land is planted to floating rice. This year he planted one and a half hectares to transplanted rice.

Floating rice is so called because the seeds normally float on top of the water as the monsoon floodwaters rise. It takes six months to grow because germination is slowed whenever the seed sinks below the water's surface. Only one crop can be harvested annually. Transplanted rice germinates in three months. One crop can be harvested before the floods and another crop can be planted after the three-month monsoon season.

Increased Yield

Transplanted rice seedlings produce the highly valued white rice selling at from 5 to 9 piasters more per kilo than the reddish­-colored grain of floating rice. Furthermore, floating rice produces only about 1,500 kilos per hectare; transplanted rice produces 2,500 to 3,000 kilos per hectare.

Farmer Quai earned 22,500 piasters from one and a half hectares of floating rice and 76,500 piasters from the same amount of land devoted to transplanted rice. And he expects another crop from his transplanted rice plot for a total annual income of 153,000 piasters from the new variety.

Also introduced to An Giang by the Chinese is the "yard-long bean." In Hoa Phu hamlet of Binh Duc village, in the Chau Thanh district eight kilometers north of Long Xuyen, Ph am Van Marn, 41, rents a hectare of government land for 2,000 piasters a year. Mam is cultivating the land until the provincial government allocates it to refugees or disposes of it in the land reform program. He has been planting local string beans that can be grown throughout the rainy season. But the beans are small and bring only 4 piasters a kilo.

This year the Chinese demonstration team convinced Mam he should try the "yard-long bean," larger than the local variety but equally adaptable to rainy-season growth. He planted four-tenths of a hectare to the Chinese import and harvested 8,000 kilos, which he marketed at 10 to 14 piasters a kilo. The yield from his demonstration plot was 35 per cent higher than the yield from a plot of the same size planted to the local string beans.

"For every two kilos of the local bean that I harvested," he said, "I harvested three kilos of the Chinese beans. And I sold the yard-long beans for three times as much."

When the Chinese agricultural experts went to An Giang in April, they set limited goals in their campaign to increase farm in­ come and diversify local diet. They planned to distribute enough seed and influence enough farmers to put 400 hectares in soybeans. Instead, 800 hectares were planted. As farmers heard of the cash more and more of them asked the Chinese and Vietnamese agricultural assistants to help them set up demonstration plots.

Next year the Chinese expect to have enough tractors, farm implements, and seed to help farmers plant 7,500 hectares of soy­beans. They also hope to increase the area of transplanted rice from 273 to 1,500 hectares. The watermelon goal is 100 hectares.

Floating rice will continue to be the main agricultural product of An Giang for some time to come. But as word spreads about the new crops and Taiwan's modern farming methods, tradition will give way to better technology, higher incomes, and an improved standard of living. The Chinese also are planting seeds of knowledge that are destined to flourish in the Mekong Delta's rich soil.

—Vietnam Feature Service