Promiscuous Transmission and Encapsulated Knowledge : A Material-Semiotic Approach to Modern Rice in the Mekong Delta

Recent histories of rice in different places and eras have stimulated a lively debate about how the traffic in living things (Oryza sativa and, in some cases, even Homo sapiens) and accompanying transfers of knowledge and technology have reshaped regional histories. The debates, highlighted in this book’s introduction, primarily concern questions about agency –where credit lies for the creation of a colonial-era cash crop in the case of the Carolina lowlands, distinctive agricultural landscapes in West Africa and Java, or in refined consumer tastes in China. Bringing these debates to the Mekong Delta in the long twentieth century (1880-present), I am repeatedly drawn to the observation that different types of rice existing simultaneously in this region signify different combinations of these material, economic, and knowledgebased relationships that have formed over time. The relative spread of one population of rice versus another tells us not only about ecology but also about shifts in world markets, access to technology, changes in labor, evolving state policies, even outbursts of war. So, rather than tell a history of rice as a sum total of rice produced in relation to changes in labor, technology, or science, this chapter aims to explore the modern histories of rice in the Mekong Delta as encapsulated in the grains of different varieties. Rice is far more than a staple of commerce; in genetic, economic, and cultural terms it is a product of a remarkable web of interrelated processes. Proponents of actor-network theory might describe specific varieties of rice assemblages as they are really ongoing, evolving products of regulating, underlying, networked relationships. Sociologist John Law describes the actor-network approach as one that treats “everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located. It assumes that nothing has reality or form outside the enactment of those relations.”Rice landraces and cultivars strike

me as provocative examples of assemblages given their genetic propensity to hybridize or become "weedy" and thus useless without constant attention from humans involved in relevant scientific, trade, or agricultural networks.The survival of Oryza in certain highly cultivated forms depends upon these networks as well as key environmental factors remaining constant.Its proliferation as a world cereal, likewise, depends on larger networks of commodity traders, trans-oceanic modes of transportation, and newer inventions such as superphosphate or small, motorized pumps that permit sustained, higher yields.The genetic information contained in rice, its encapsulated knowledge, has also become more tied to global networks of scientists, international labs, multinational seed companies, and even the arcane world of patent law.Meanwhile, rice farmers, who possess knowledge about rice cultivation, have also become increasingly connected to agricultural extension offices sharing the latest methods to eradicate pests, increase yields, and use new technologies.So rice, especially rice varieties in the twentieth century, offers a lens for peering more deeply into the ways that innovation in science or technology, instances of war, and changes in policy have had major social and environmental impacts on society.
This chapter explores a twentieth-century history of rice in the Mekong Delta from the in-grain perspective of four different sub-groups of rice: longstem and short-stem landraces, high-value cultivars and high-yield cultivars.(I use the term landraces to refer to traditional or heirloom varieties of rice developed by natural processes, usually over many years, and adapted to local environmental conditions.A landrace differs from a cultivar in the sense that a cultivar is selected via more labor-intense methods, often in experimental settings, and maintained by more rigorous methods of propagation and screening.)Within each of these groupslandraces, high-value cultivars and high-yield cultivarsare dozens to hundreds of varieties that, if examined more closely, could describe finer differences in rice breeding, rice trade, and ecosystems.This chapter keeps to a higher-level perspective, showing more general actor-networks associated with these four types of cultivated rice.The changing populations of these four types of rice reflect major differences in ecosystem (short-versus long-stem), policy (land races versus cultivars), and technology (landraces versus high-yield cultivars).As with most river deltas, the Mekong Delta is a patchwork of many different hydro-landscapes in one: alluvial banks, brackish water back swamps, and vast flood plains that are seasonally inundated under a meter or two of water.Each hydro-terrain presents different challenges to rice cultivators (Figure 5.1).As increasingly more humans have settled here, roughly one million in 1860 compared with over nineteen million today, rice species have followed them.Many hundreds of landraces have gone extinct while several dozen high-yield varieties now cover more than 90 percent of the delta's fields.However, this image of skyrocketing population growth and mass extinction for hundreds of landraces can be misleading.The reduced variety in plants makes key commercial Promiscuous Transmission and Encapsulated Knowledge species more vulnerable than ever to evolving pests.Also, in the margins of many fields grow wild and weedy relatives that, without careful selection, can cross with commercial plants and produce less productive offspring.Thus, each grain of rice is not just a product of human labor but also a seed of encapsulated knowledge produced by human and natural events.Rice is also highly promiscuous, even capable of reproducing with other rice species, thus threatening in each successive generation to become less adapted, less useful without careful attention.
Managing sustained production in a rice field is a struggle!It requires steady applications (and updates) of traditional and scientific know-how.The color, taste, and nutritional properties of rice, its material properties, often ensure its survival in local and global commerce.Imagine farmers, scientists, and millers all locked in a struggle with rice's natural promiscuity.These different human activitiesscientific research, weeding, gradingcan in Latour's idea of actor-networks be construed as performances that ensure  what he describes as the durability of a particular, social-natural assemblage, in this case a highly-valued strain of rice.2There is a great monetary distance, for example, between highly coveted long grain rices such as Basmati or the Carolina golden varieties and the less fragrant, less colorful, broken varieties that end up in industrial starches and animal feeds.
Assuming this material semiotics perspective on rice in the Mekong Delta, the historical narrative that results is one best re-centered to particular rice types and the environments that supported them.The twentieth century was for rice as with other species one of accelerated movement, globe-spanning reach, rapid hybridization, and in many instances extinction.As with other species, rapid extinction of wild relatives such as Oryza rufipogons may mean the loss of potentially useful genes. 3Most if not all aspects of rice production underwent major and rapid changes over the past century.Labor changed dramatically with the advent of new machinery and changing land use practices.The genetic makeup of rice also underwent rapid changes with the advent of high-yield rice seed in the 1960s and, more recently, with the mapping of rice genomes and the development of transgenic rice.Finally, the war that raged in the Mekong Delta in 1960s played a role in this history.Modern, high-yield rice became popular in government-controlled areas while landraces and wild species thrived in free-fire zones and "liberated" territory.With Vietnam's reunification after 1975 and especially its market-oriented reforms in 1986, just over 40 varieties of modern rice account for the majority of land planted in rice.Many of the hundreds of landraces have disappeared.At all points in this turbulent twentieth century, changes in rice reflect deep changes in political and agricultural economies.
cultures colliding: long-stem and short-stem Until as recently as 1980, large swaths of the Mekong Delta were annually flooded, turning into vast inland lakes dotted by a few stands of trees lining dikes and clumps of reeds, wild rice and deepwater rice greening the surface.Lands so bitterly contested in the Indochina Wars laid seasonally silent under a sheet of brownish, silt-laden water.During the war years, in flood season wild stocks of fish migrated downstream from Cambodia along with birds, mosquitoes, and snakes.This persistence of a seemingly wild, ancient landscape was of course an anomaly in the waning days of the Green Revolution.Vietnam's market-oriented "doi moi" reforms in 1986 and subsequent economic boom permitted a delayed boom for companies selling pesticides, fertilizers, and motorized equipment.The war-wilded floodplains and swamps have given way, rapidly, to a more familiar view in the late twentieth century of industrial agriculture.Vast Dutch-style polders now keep most of the seasonal floods out.They are filled with paddy, houses on stilts, and roadway billboards advertising the wares of chemical and agribusiness corporations.
This delayed wave of industrialization has finally blurred one of the most important dividing lines in any river delta: elevation.Elevation divides social groups, differentiates ecosystems, and plays an important role in the history of rice.For several millennia in the Mekong Delta, it played a central role in the spatial distribution of settlements and accompanying rice types.There are two main types of high-elevation land in the delta: island-like mountain outcroppings in the upper delta and alluvial banks in the lower delta.The mountain outcroppings straddle the present-day border between Vietnam and Cambodia and contain most of the ancient inhabited sites.This ancient history of settlement and rice (as early as 500 BCE) was generally unknown to the world before 1930.A French colonial administrator, Pierre Paris, using aerial photographs, detected an ancient canal system connecting these mountain outcroppings.4 Louis Malleret, a librarian working for the Société des Études Indochinoises in Japanese-occupied Saigon, followed Paris' discoveries; and in 1943, he commenced an archeological dig at the most prominent canal nexus, Oc Eo.That work became the basis for his doctoral thesis in 1949 and resulted in a four-volume work, l'Archéologie du Delta du Mékong (published from 1959-63) that has, with more recent archaeological excavations, established these high-elevation sites as part of a regional, pre-Angkor or Oc Eo culture that lasted from approximately 500 BCE to 500 CE.5Even in the Vietnamese portion of the Mekong Delta today, most of the villages located near these ancient sites are still ethnically Khmer.Recent archaeological digs at such upstream sites as Angkor Borei suggest that farmers along these hills practiced bund irrigation at higher elevations and flood-recession irrigation at seasonally inundated slopes.Rice varieties in these areas tended towards shorter-stem landraces.Farmers broadcast long-stem, flood-tolerant varieties in the basins below; but most farm labor, scarce until recent times, was focused on cultivating rice in the flood recession zones. 6he other elevated region, alluvial banks or what Vietnamese locals call the miet vuon (garden strips), looks from the air like a web of silted banks hugging rivers, arroyos, and canals.It is in this elevated web that the majority of the delta's population expanded rapidly in the modern era (1700-present).All of the region's major towns and cities, some now approaching a million people, are located in the miet vuon, too (see Figure 5.1).
Modern settlement of the miet vuon from the 1600s was far from a peaceful process.A Vietnamese general, Nguyen Huu Canh, led a military campaign against Cham and Khmer forces in 1698.He finally seized Saigon for the Vietnamese crown and traveled along the Upper Branch (Tien Giang) of the Mekong close to the present-day Cambodian border.He later died from infection near present-day Long Xuyen.7 His excursion was followed in the 1700s by successive waves of Vietnamese soldier-settlers.Vietnamese settlement was also augmented by several waves of Chinese Ming loyalists who fled the Qing Dynasty's anti-Ming campaigns of 1683.Chinese from coastal provinces such as Guangzhou and Fukien settled by the thousands along Southeast Asian rivers.They sought patronage from the royal courts at Hue (Dai Viet), Phnom Penh (Cambodia) and Ayutthaya (Siam); then over several decades, they capitalized on extensive mercantile experience in the South China Sea trade to establish new, thriving ports, some even as walled cities at such places as Saigon, My Tho, and Ha Tien.Even today, a quick tour along the roads or waterways of the Mekong Delta reveals how ethnic Khmer, Vietnamese, and Chinese communities became densely intermingled in the miet vuon.Towns such as Soc Trang have retained their original Khmer names, Theravada Buddhist temples, and Khmer scripts on signs, while Vietnamese and Chinese neighborhoods have grown around them.
While these elevated places are central to the history of settlement and rice cultivation, the vast depressions in the delta are also interesting as contrary spaces.The large, intersecting regions of back swamps, mangroves, tide marshes and depressions cover more than two-thirds of the delta's surface area.These depressed regions were largely wilderness into the late nineteenth century.In the dry season, elephants roamed through grasslands along with herds of deer and large predators.Farmers routinely encountered cobras and other highly venomous snakes.Conversion of the depressions and marshes happened largely in response to events in the miet vuon.As Vietnamese officials and military units consolidated authority over the miet vuon, more and more Khmer families relocated into the floodplains, seeking refuge.The southernmost third of the delta, known as the Ca Mau Peninsula (Figure 5.1), was famous in the early 1800s as the kingdom's top producer of beeswax and honey.Khmer harvesters paddled canoes through dark mangroves, smoked out the hives and then collected the wax floating on the water surface. 8eople who moved into the depressions did not have to abandon their rice, however.They switched varieties to long-stem landraces, either deepwater or floating varieties.Deepwater rice grows between 50-100 cm and possesses moderate elongation abilities during floods while floating rice grows longer than 100 cm and has very strong elongation abilities, able to grow well over a meter in just one week! 9Long-stem rice delivered less volume per hectare than short-stem rice; yet for people living in far-flung, seasonal communities, sometimes on the run, floating rice was a vital staple.
In the Mekong Delta, when I asked (Vietnamese) farmers about who traditionally grew deepwater rice, the response was almost always "Khmer."On a trip to visit an agricultural research station near Can Tho in 2002, one farmer showed me a specially adapted "Khmer" tool with a longer curved sickle and explained that it was adapted to gather the longer rice stems.He also explained how, during the years of the National Liberation Front in the 1960s, he and his Vietnamese colleagues used the same tools to harvest rice in the base areas hidden deep in the mangrove swamps.He then showed me the shorter "Vietnamese" sickles and blades used to harvest short-stem rice."Was floating rice a Khmer rice?"I asked."Of course," he replied.10This story illustrates the sensitive issue of Viet-Khmer relations that, since Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia in the 1980s, taint any historical treatment of the delta's Khmer heritage.At the same time it also conveys how readily Vietnamese revolutionaries adapted the seed and tools when they were forced into depressed areas, thus suggesting that long-stem landraces and associated tools were easily transferred from one culture to another.Today, the few communities that still grow floating rice are for the most part Khmer; but affiliation with long-stem rice seems to have less to do with cultural preferences than class.Richer families live on higher ground and tend to grow short-stem rice.
There is strong evidence, however, to suggest that modern deepwater rice was a grain of choice in the delta's ancient past.Archaeological excavations at Oc Eo sites suggest that ancient towns (circa 300 CE) marketed floating rice.While upriver sites such as Angkor Borei (Figure 5.1) may have tended towards shorter-stem landraces in bunds and flood-recession areas, those living and working at the downstream port (the Oc Eo site) grew floating rice.The port city rested on wooden piers and the surrounding basin was likely flooded much of the year.11Exhaustion of timber supplies coupled with changes in the water table, the spread of malaria or piracy may have caused the demise of the port and its floating rice stands. 12eepwater rice was the landrace of choice for those on the run; people who wanted to avoid greater integration into the state moved into the floodplains.Whether these were Khmer farmers seeking to avoid conscription or Vietnamese radicals building an insurgency in the 1930s, they typically opted for cultivation of floating or even wild rice (Oryza rufipogons).Floating rice was well adapted to growing not only in flooded fields but also in oxbow swamps and depressions that required limited attention when weeds were removed or seeds broadcasted.For people on the run, such rice formed an essential staple for foraging.A French lieutenant, leading a survey mission across such a depression in 1871, described one journey through such a nonstate space.Upon reaching the edge of an alluvial zone, his crew organized fifteen longboats in a Khmer village paddled by villagers who worked in the swampy areas.On their departure across the watery bowl (vi thuy) for which the village was named, he noted "the dugout becomes a species of broad shoe, slipping with speed on cut or curved grasses.Enough broad packages of rebel grasses form often, causing interruptions where it is necessary to carry the dugout by hand, through what can be called a trập [pit]."The survey mission noted plantations of the tall grasses, indicating that they were likely actively cultivated.However, it also recorded the local name for the rice, "phantom rice," a name typically associated with the wild species Oryza rufipogons. 13hese blurred boundaries between cultivated and wild rice and fields and swamps contrasted sharply with the rectangular boundaries of fields in the miet vuon.
Thus the cultures associated with short-stem and long-stem landraces were not so much defined by ethnicity as by their (vertical) position vis a vis the state.It should be no surprise that colonial engineers from the 1880s on targeted these vast, non-state areas for reclamation and offered concessions to French companies.The more densely populated miet vuon simply presented too much political resistance.Thus, much of the area in the depressions in the Mekong Delta became colonial-era plantations.By 1930, over nine thousand kilometers of canals opened up more than two million hectares in the old depressions to estates populated with several million migrants and tenants growing short-stem varieties.Older cultivators who lacked land title, including many Khmers, retreated further out from these encroaching estates to more remote swamps.It should be no surprise that the same estates, located in hydrologically vulnerable terrain, became prime battlegrounds for post-1945 revolutionary struggles.Vietnamese tenants, deeply in debt, joined the August Revolution en masse to fight against the return of French rule.This war escalated from the "French War" into the "American War."Many of the same areas became free-fire zones, and they remained seasonally flooded through most of the war years due to destruction or neglect on the canals and polders.
Because of the fighting, cultivation of floating rice (and short-stem landraces) persisted even as high yield rice and the Green Revolution had rapidly transformed other Southeast Asian deltas.In 1974, 500,000 hectares of land around Chau Doc and Long Xuyen were still planted in floating rice. 14Land reform, both in 1970 and after 1975, largely eliminated deepwater and floating rice from the delta.The first reform, called Land to the Tiller, started in March 1970.It split up large landholdings, but it also placed limits on the maximum size of landholdings to three hectares.Farmers in the flood zone typically farmed ten hectares since the single season crop generated only about one ton per hectare (compared to two or three tons/ha in a shortstem field or six for high yield varieties). 15 Both the pre-1975 Republic of Vietnam and the post-1975 Socialist Republic of Vietnam initiated policies that favored the further extension of small landholdings and high yield rice from the miet vuon into the flood plains.Reforms initiated in 1985 have, in the nearly 30 years since, resulted in over four billion USD invested in dikes and pumping stations to regulate much of the flood zones as short-stem polders.Meanwhile, rice production across the delta region has increased from roughly 1.5 tons per hectare in 1973 to over 7 tons per hectare today.This recent boom in rice production, however, has come at a price.An estimated 94 percent of all rice grown in the delta today is high-yield rice.This means that not only have land races of floating rice and long-stem varieties disappeared but so too have many short-stem varieties. 16e rise of the cultivar This global shift from land races to cultivars, plants that were selectively propagated for certain traits, has only recently given rise to concerns about biodiversity loss among rice varieties.Until the late 1990s, most researchers focused on the incredible proliferation of rice-growing operations.Starting from the perspective of a single cultivar such as "Carolina rice" (long grain O. sativa) imported from Java in the 1870s or the International Rice Research Institute's "IR8" imported from the Philippines in 1966-1967, one can trace outwards the political forces and modernist overtones connected with their adoption.French rice researchers from the 1880s to the 1940s lamented the relatively low quality of export rice derived from the local landraces, and they sought repeatedly to acclimatize other, more desirable "races" in the delta soils.American agricultural advisors in the 1960s similarly sought to improve rice production to "win hearts and minds" and spark economic modernization in South Vietnam.A closer focus on modern cultivars also reveals a lot about politics and ideology, from the workings of colonial rice research stations to discourses on race, degeneration, and acclimatization, and more recently to the increasing influence of global research networks and multinational seed companies.
The first cultivar of interest, what French rice researchers called "Carolina rice" even though it was raised in Java, was by all accounts a flop.Repeated efforts to acclimatize the gold standard of commercial rice in the Mekong Delta failed.Failures, however, can be instructive.They point towards broader weaknesses in colonial society as it related to agriculture.Economic historian Peter Coclanis makes a compelling case for the role of Southeast Asian rice in re-shaping the global rice trade by the 1860s; however, not all Southeast Asian rice was made equal.17In Cochinchina, professional organizations such as the Committee of Agriculture and Industry repeatedly published accounts of efforts to introduce varieties of Bengal or Carolina rice (from Java) to "improve" local varieties.There was a long-running discussion among French scientists and businessmen in the Committee about the problems with traditional rice.In one such meeting about the causes of inferiority of Cochinchina's rice in European markets, the Committee's businessmen pointed to a number of factors.For one, Vietnamese farmers cultivated many different varieties of rice.Among these varieties, one man noted, "there are some that must be worth as much as the most popular rice from other regions." 18The problem, reiterated by Frenchmen for decades thereafter, stemmed from a lack of control in selecting grains in the fields and separating rice in processing.
Almost always, French discussions in such venues about problems in rice transshipment, selection, husking, and drying returned to the powerful roles played by Chinese companies and intermediaries.The role of Chinese families in the shipment and polishing of rice pre-dated the French in Saigon by more than a century.Frenchmen, from an early point in the colonial conquest, recognized that they could not outdo indigenous farmers and Chinese merchants in rice.As one famous colonial explorer, Auguste Pavie, noted about the French troops accompanying him on his forays up the Mekong, most Frenchmen simply could not give up their baguettes for rice.While the Vietnamese porters and Pavie himself enjoyed steaming hot bowls of rice at almost every meal, new arrivals from France "savored their bread" even as it grew moldy in the tropical heat. 19ven most French plantation owners were removed from working with rice.They relied on tenant farmers to cultivate the crop, Chinese businesses to ship it to mills and Chinese businesses in Cho Lon (present-day Ho Chi Minh City) to husk it and export most of the crop to Asian markets.This Asian minority's privileged position in the French colonial era continued an older arrangement begun in the 1600s across much of Southeast Asia.Chinese emigres fleeing the Qing Dynasty traveled in a fleet of merchant and military ships off the coast of central Vietnam.They asked the ruler of the southern half of Vietnam for asylum, and he quickly pointed them to the kingdom's far southern frontier with Cambodia.There they established mercantile posts at the present-day cities of Ho Chi Minh City (Sai Gon) and My Tho (Figure 5.1).These were not masses of impoverished Chinese peasants but well-organized groups of wealthy merchant families and military officers. 20his ethnic division of rice shipment and polishing persisted throughout the colonial era and after.The autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras, L'Amant, explores the problems of crossing social and racial divisions in colonial society as a French teenage girl living with her widowed mother in the Khmer town Sadec becomes a lover to a wealthy Chinese young man who gives her a ride from her mother's modest country home to his family's mansion in Cho Lon. 21A 1992 film adaption by the same name shows in beautiful sweeps of cinematic landscape the transitions between ethnic lines that accompanied movement from fields and canals to urban mills and warehouses on the Saigon waterfront.Even after the creation of the Republic of Vietnam in 1955, ethnic Chinese families continued to pay large sums of money for monopoly rights to mill rice and sell it wholesale.With American commodity import programs in the 1960s came portable, diesel-powered rice mills from Japan and Taiwan.These portable machines presented the first significant threat to the old mills and the ethnic separation in the rice trade that had persisted for 300 years.For a time, older mill operators in government-controlled lands lobbied to prevent this technology from getting into the hands of farmers; so instead the small machines wound their way into insurgent-controlled lands.The National Liberation Front took up rice milling, and some NLF supporters even sold it in government-controlled markets to raise cash. 22ature also conspired against French bids to control commerce.Rice traveled, from the 1860s to the 1960s, on longboats to larger waterways.From there it was transferred to flat-bottomed barges that navigated the delta's larger arroyos and canals to Cho Lon.French businesses, operating such fleets simply could not compete with local rice shippers.One surveyor in 1880 remarked: From a purely economic point of view, in this country of river navigation par excellence, where each center [of the delta] would provide quite sufficient freight to feed a service of large riverboats . . . to move rice freight distances of one hundred miles on assembled longboats with 10 to 15 oarsmen, moored against the bank when the current is opposing, obliged in each arroyo to wait until high tide to cross the sandbar, this is nonsense . . .under this pretext our trade remains in the hands of the Chinese, thus we are conducting our commerce on their terms. 23roughout the decades of colonial rule, from the 1860s to the 1930s, colonial businessmen and scientists lamented this perfect storm of factors that prevented them from getting higher prices for their rice, especially in Europe.Chinese businesses controlled the rice trade and Vietnamese rice farmers preferred to grow a wide variety of landraces in their fields.While other Southeast Asian colonies such as the Dutch Indies and British India sent much of their rice exports to European markets, three-quarters of Mekong Delta rice exports went for the most part to China.Japanese rice merchants even imported the "inferior" Mekong Delta rice to feed their own populations while exporting higher grade, Japanese rice to Europe. 24lso conspiring against the French was the promiscuous nature of rice and an inability to control the field conditions where rice grew.French boosters for improving rice exports repeatedly mentioned such ideal rice varieties as the famed "Goldseed" of Georgetown, South Carolina or the "Tanggerang" of Java.However, when entrepreneurs attempted to grow imported stocks of these varieties, within a few generations their offspring had outcrossed virtually all of their prized traits.They were simply outnumbered in field trials by ever-hybridizing, Vietnamese neighbors.French rice prospectors could not feasibly rid fields of these native landraces.Another problem, internal to the French colony, was a lack of political and financial support for building rice research stations.Where Dutch, British and American governments had funded active rice research stations by 1910, French support in Indochina was mostly lip service.This lack of funding in turn meant a lack of skilled technicians or a cadre of extension agents who might have been able to carry out efforts to introduce more profitable varieties.Wrote one such critic: "It is known that purebred progeny and pedigree comes from units through which the primary characters chosen were transmitted hereditarily keeping stability and homogeneity."The problem, then, was not a lack of knowledge but more a lack of will to maintain the hereditary stability of valuable seed. 25n 1906, several wealthy French businesses even imported Javanese workers in an attempt to improve the quality of the plantation's output with imported Javanese know-how.As with the Javanese rice, however, migrant Vietnamese tenants quickly outnumbered the Javanese laborers.Dutch restrictions on the movement of Javanese labor after World War I finally put an end to the program. 26he general failures of the colonial state to "improve" rice varieties makes for an actor-network story of indurability, as told from the perspective of imported Javanese and Carolina wonder seeds that never took.Of course, if told by native Vietnamese or Khmers more interested in their own favored varieties, the flip side of this story, the durability of traditional cultivars might signify a kind of agri-cultural resistance.There was not a sufficient network of French rice technicians and Vietnamese extension agents to distribute seed and ensure proper controls to maintain traits.The commercial network was instead controlled by ethnic-Chinese businesses; and those businesses specialized in exporting varieties popular as basic foodstuffs to China and other Asian countries rather than varieties preferred in European exchanges.So the role of taste, particularly Vietnamese, Chinese, and Asian tastes, for rice was another important factor in the lack of durability for "Carolina rice" or "Tanggerang."French failures to populate these special rice genomes, even in the floodplains where large plantations were established as factory towns, reflected at heart the deeper conflicts colonial authorities faced in gaining control over the millions of Vietnamese, Khmer, and Chinese who had been engaged in the rice trade long before the gunboats arrived.
Failures in "improving" rice cultivation during the early decades of the twentieth century, especially in the 1930s, turned some French agronomists into radicals who grew increasingly opposed to estate-run agriculture.Rene Dumont, a newly graduated agronomist assigned to a rice research station near Hanoi in 1931, published one of the first modern anthropological and geographical studies of Vietnamese rice in 1935.In it, he carefully studied traditional tools, rice types, water-lifting techniques, and planting techniques; he marveled at traditional environmental knowledge employed to maintain the Red River Delta's vast and ancient network of flood dikes. 27The result of Dumont's study was one of the first in a series of encyclopedic works to come out on the intricacies of Vietnamese rice that have become models for rural anthropology.Given the circulation of such agronomists throughout the colonial empire, from Indochina to the South Pacific to West Africa, such works also contributed to an increasingly global field of tropical agriculture.It even launched some political careers.Dumont returned to France and advanced a more socialist view of agriculture in the 1950s; in the 1960s he regularly appeared on French television with harsh critiques of environmental damage brought by Green Revolution pesticides and fertilizers.In 1974, he ran as France's first environmentalist candidate for President (and lost).There were other famous and influential agronomists and geographers from this era, notably tropical geographer Pierre Gourou and Vietnamese anthropologist Nguyen Van Huyen (who after 1945 served as Ho Chi Minh's Minister of Education).
Among French colonial scientists involved with rice, one individual in particular, Yves Henry, played a pivotal role in fomenting these 1930s-era studies of rice agriculture.Henry, a former colonial servant in both West Africa and French Indochina published more than 30 works with the help of teams of indigenous researchers and French graduate students such as Dumont and Gourou.Henry rose to the position of Inspector General of Agriculture for the Colonies after the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931.Before then he had studied the cultivation of cotton in the Senegal and Gambia Rivers and published extensively on rice in Indochina. 28So, French networks of agronomists continued to expand, but they never again played a major role in the development of rice landscapes in Vietnam.
Flash forward to the mid-1960s and a very different modern rice story emerged.The recently formed International Rice Research Institute released "IR8" and farmers, at least in government-controlled areas, learned of the crop's incredibly productive results.With motorized pumps irrigating fields and access to chemical fertilizers and pesticides, farmers quickly became interested in claims that IR8 would double or triple crop yields.A series of other IRRI seeds followed in the 1970s.By 1994 some 42 IRRI varieties accounted for more than 60 percent of all rice areas in Vietnam.Since 1971, Vietnamese rice scientists such as the delta's most famous, Dr. Vo Tong Xuan, worked closely with IRRI and returned to fill top posts in rice research institutes and universities across Vietnam. 29Since 1994, the percentage of land devoted to IRRI strains has now grown to over 94 percent!Thus new networks of Vietnamese scientists, millions of farmers, seed merchants, and others have managed to re-populate the delta with a relatively small "family" of genotypes while many if not most of the hundreds of landraces once common in 1930 have disappeared, confined to 6 percent of rice-growing areas. 30f one considers the IRRI strains as a relatively homogenous group of modern cultivars, what is most amazing is just how durable in the actornetwork sense this assemblage has been.IRRI varieties have simultaneously multiplied crop yields while leading to near-monoculture conditions for preferred varieties across large areas.Critiques of the Green Revolution, spurred largely by IRRI varieties, and negative impacts on biodiversity are well known.However, with respect to an actor-network approach, its impressive how IR8 and its cousins became so prolific so rapidly.Contrary to the colonial example above, Americans did not play the leading role in popularizing IRRI rice inside Vietnam.American agencies, even the U.S. Army, introduced it to Vietnam beginning in 1967, but they only marginally succeeded in winning over cultivators.They did, however, play an important supporting role with respect to high-yield rice in the Mekong Delta.The Philippines-based research network that produced IR8 was supported by two American foundations and led by American scientists.The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations provided the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) with initial funding in 1960; and the Philippines, a former American colony and an ally in the Cold War, provided logistical support via a former agricultural college founded by the former colonial government at Los Banos, Laguna.A history of IRRI's early years suggests an intensely American-focused operation, where senior American scientists and officials received compensation paid in dollars from the Rockefeller Foundation along the same lines as Americans working for U.S. government agencies and corporations in overseas posts.As in these other posts, there was a significant difference in salaries, too, between Americans and their Asian counterparts. 31he development of the first, commercially viable IRRI strain, IR8, reflects the role of this postcolonial institution: Americans running the breeding program and scientists from Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and East Pakistan (Bangladesh) involved in the transmission of new varieties to their respective countries.IR8 was one of the first widely dispersed IRRI varieties.Rice breeder Peter Jennings, together with a handful of local research assistants, made 38 crosses in 1962 between short-stem Taiwanese varieties called deegeo-woo-gen or Taichung Native 1 with long-stem, tropical indica varieties.The 8th cross (hence the name IR8), involved a cross between dee-geo-woogen and an indica variety popular in the Philippines called peta.From the cross, 130 seeds were generated.Seeds from the first generation (F1) yielded about 10,000 offspring.Taller, late-maturing plants in the second generation (F2) were separated, and seed from the shorter-stemmed plants were re-planted in a blast disease nursery.In the third generation plants (F3), those with strongest resistance to blast disease were separated.Seed from F3 was then planted into 298 rows to generate the fourth generation of plants.
In this F4 field, on the 288th row, the 3rd plant was selected to be the progenitor for what was more technically labeled IR8-288-3.In late 1965, seed packets containing the offspring of IR8-288-3 traveled home with the Asian scientists to their domestic research stations.At stations in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia, of all IRRI varieties tested, IR8-288-3 delivered repeatedly high yields, generally around 6,000 kg/ha.32Thus in 1966, the Green Revolution was born.
While American scientists played a key role in directing the development of the high-yield rice genome in the Philippines, Americans in South Vietnam and the Mekong Delta played a more peripheral role in establishing highyield rice due largely to the massive presence of American troops and violent fighting in rural areas.While the transfer of IR8 to rice research stations happened rather quietly in Thailand, in Vietnam transfers often involved more attention.For example, the U.S. Army flew several tons of seed into a flood-damaged valley north of Saigon by helicopter.Taiwanese agricultural advisors assisted farmers in caring for the IR8 seed, and reports from the harvest in January showed good results.However, just after the rice was harvested, the Tet Offensive commenced and the valley was overrun by the National Liberation Front. 33Across the Mekong Delta, the American presence in rural areas was so tenuous that the sustained attention necessary to raise a crop was not often possible.An American agricultural advisor with the U.S. Agency for International Development described another failed experiment with IRRI rice where 47 varieties including IR8 were planted in a nursery near a relatively secure town in the Mekong Delta, Long Xuyen.The head of the experimental farm, however, was not from the area and did not fully appreciate the area's susceptibility to deep flooding.Floods arrived and the entire seed crop was lost. 34nstead of Americans, in 1967-68 Vietnamese entrepreneurs and other Asian advisors, especially Taiwanese, made the first sustained breakthroughs in raising high-yield rice.In some ways, this linking up of Vietnamese farmers and Chinese rice specialists reflected older linkages between Vietnamese farmers and Chinese rice brokers established several centuries earlier.Put simply, these individuals knew rice.The only portion of knowledge they lacked was the labscape essential for screening a variety such as IR8-288-3.However, with seed packs, access to motorized pumps and fields ideally situated in the well-drained miet vuon, this new network of Vietnamese and expat-Chinese farmers, technical experts, and businessmen provided a robust base for IR8's early distribution.
While the American-sponsored rice station near Long Xuyen failed to generate new seed, a private farmer just down the road became locally famous for harvesting his own crop of IR8 and quadrupling his rice yield.Interviews revealed that he had bought several kilograms of seed from an ethnic-Chinese seed dealer in the river port, My Tho.He planted the seed in a raised bed alongside a highway built on a natural alluvial bank.He applied fertilizers, supplied through American aid programs, and he irrigated the field with a small motor pump.By late 1968, this farmer had made a small fortune selling two successive harvests of seed to area farmers.A Vietnamese national television crew visited the farm as did several hundred farmers.So many came to see this "miracle rice" that he repeatedly complained of farmers stealing seed from his fields at night. 35Thus Taiwanese advisors played a more prominent role than Americans in 1967-68 in part because they could move more freely in delta towns.They worked closely with Vietnamese farmers for long spells in the field to develop simple, technological improvements.This work went largely unnoticed by Americans.Only in late 1967, did a Rhodes Scholar, Robert Sansom, note in a report to American officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development that farmers around Mỹ Tho had bought approximately 80,000 "shrimp-tail" boat motors and rigged them up as gas-powered water pumps. 36rom 1968 to 1975, the success of IRRI varieties was repeatedly limited by war-related disruptions.NARA-CP 1968. 36 Sansom 1967.government-controlled towns across free-fire zones into liberated zones.The high yield rice was for the most part limited to fields along key highways and in staunchly anti-communist areas. 37The Mekong Delta's most famous rice researcher, Dr. Vo Tong Xuan, noted that in 1974, over 500,000 hectares or 25 percent of delta land was planted in IRRI rice; however, from the first major plantings in 1968, the Mekong Delta remained a net importer of rice.High yield varieties had failed to deliver because "development planners only think of a separate component of a new package of practices but never of local people's readiness to make full use of such innovations." 38In other words the actor-network essential to making IR8 successful required the full support of farmers, a viable transport system, and a functioning government.Popular herbicides such as 2,4-D were in short supplylikely due to high demand for the chemical as it was used by the U.S. military in Agent Orange.Fertilizer merchants also regularly engaged in price gouging during the peak season for planting; and others cut fertilizers with brick dust or sand thus reducing potency.Finally, Xuan suggested that the Saigon government may have overstated the area of land in cultivation; likely much of it was already abandoned as war refugees flooded into the cities. 39 A closer study of Dr. Xuan's work with IRRI and high-yield rice in the Mekong Delta, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, shows that maintaining the durability of IRRI rice and maintaining higher yields was a struggle.In fact, IR8 never became the high-yield genome that launched Vietnam's Green Revolution.Its growing season was a few weeks too long, and it was very susceptible to one of the delta's fiercest rice predators, the brown plant hopper.When uncontrolled, this insect cased losses of roughly 60% in a crop.In 1971, the U.S. Agency for International Development signed a contract with IRRI to set up a plant breeding operation in the Mekong Delta near Mỹ Tho.IRRI scientists imported over a thousand rice lines from the headquarters.Dr. Xuan worked together with this new group of American and Vietnamese scientists that included IRRI's chief plant breeder, Dr. Dwight W. Kanter.In 1973 they released Tân Nông [TN, New Agriculture] number 73.Dr. Xuan, working from his offices at Can Tho University, then used a radio program broadcast across the Mekong Delta to educate farmers about techniques for controlling brown plant hopper through planting TN73 and two new IRRI strains, IR26 and IR30. 40he war ended in 1975, but still rice yields did not improve.The brown plant hopper evolved into a new biotype that soon plagued TN73, IR26 and IR30.In 1976-77, this new biotype ravaged over 700,000 hectares of high yield riceonce again threatening the survival of the variety.At the former IRRI fields near My Tho, just one Vietnamese researcher stayed behind to continue screening varieties in hopes of finding a new variety.Cut off from his American colleagues who returned to Los Banos after the war in 1975, Dr. Xuan wrote to his colleagues asking for help.They sent him an envelope containing four packets, each containing five grams of new high yield varieties.After multiplying one resistant variety, IR36, from five grams to two thousand kilograms a year and a half later, Dr. Xuan convinced the school rector to close the school for two months and send each student out with one kilogram of seed.Every student in the university received a crash course in preparing nurseries and transplanting.This variety's success won over most farmers and especially Vietnamese officials at all levels of government. 41r. Xuan's two encounters with the brown plant hopper and his success with IR26 reminds us that even with Green Revolution varieties, promiscuous transmission of genes and resistance occurred not only in rice but also in predators.Thus the notion here of a single, high-yield rice genome serving as the basis for widespread economic and ecological changes is misleading.The most important actors in this genome's survival were those people organized by Dr. Xuan and Can Tho University in 1978, later replaced by professional staff at rice research stations and agricultural extension programs across Vietnam.The IRRI research facility in Los Banos played a pivotal role, too, in supplying new genomes to combat an evolving brown plant hopper; but success in the Mekong Delta replied on the coordinated activities of approximately 2,000 students turning five grams of seed into several million tons covering 700,000 hectares!Several years later, with the market-oriented reforms, Vietnam emerged from being a net rice importer to one of the world's largest rice exporters.Vietnam's continuing role as a leader in rice exports depends on the continuation of this actor network built upon close coordination between farmers, politicians, and rice research institutions.Writes Dr. Xuan: The effect of this work on a Vietnamese leader at the district, province, or national level has been very pronounced.When Vietnamese leadersmost of whom are politicianstalk about development, they talk about rice.When they talk about rice, they talk about new varieties from IRRI.This top-down approach by the Vietnamese government to agricultural development has accelerated the use of new varieties from IRRI throughout Vietnam.Even now, if we do not have new lines to release each year, scientists are criticized first by the farmers and then by national and provincial leaders.Consequently, every Vietnamese agricultural scientist is trying to develop new rice varieties adapted to each local situation.In addition, the Vietnamese farmer, especially the southern Vietnamese farmer, is very market oriented, always wanting something new.Most Vietnamese farmers want to replace the variety they have been growing for two or three crop seasons to keep up with the evolution of the insects, pests, and diseases in the field. 42is quote from Dr. Xuan is insightful, for it suggests two things.First, the intensive organization of politicians, farmers, and rice scientists is a requirement to continue producing new strains of IRRI rice that can continue to adapt to changing ecological conditions.However, when one considers the intense pressures riding on these rice researchers to get it right or risk an economic disaster, is it possible that rice could be organizing us?In other words, rice genomes possess a remarkable ability to outcross and lose sought-after traits.As scientists move ever deeper into investigations of rice's encapsulated knowledge in its DNA, keeping up with the evolution of cultivars requires ever more discipline among the ranks of breeders, plant scientists, politicians, private firms, and farmers.Thus a particular genetic variety such as IR36 can be viewed as an assemblage formed through repeated efforts to cross varieties, screen the offspring, and then isolate specific plants.Conversely, such an assemblage brings with it a very tightly defined set of procedures for maintaining it as a productive variety.With any serious disruptions in these networks, the variety fades into a genetic swamp of weedy relatives.

into the promiscuous wilderness
In the Mekong Delta today, one often gets the sense of living in a boom economy perched delicately on a razor's edge from disaster.Rice production continues to rise while old river towns grow into citiessome now with over a million residents.The delta's largest university, Can Tho University, is now sponsoring 1,000 students to pursue PhDs from internationally-acclaimed schools in such fields as rice science, mechanical engineering, hydrology, and information sciences.Where a handful of PhDs such as Dr. Xuan were around to save the delta from the brown plant hopper in 1978, there are now hundreds of expertly trained rice scientists.While the future for many of the delta's twenty million people looks brighter and more peaceful than ever, there are nevertheless serious concerns, mostly environmental.The Mekong Delta is one of the world's flattest deltasjust a meter or so above sea level per one hundred kilometers; and sea levels are rising.Upstream on the Mekong various nations and private companies are moving ahead with plans to build hydroelectric dams on the Mekong mainstream.Nobody is exactly sure what effects this regulated river flow will have on the lower delta, but many are concerned about reduced silt, greater salinity, and subsidence.Finally, sustained alterations to paddy fields with chemical fertilizers and insecticides and widespread impoundment of water means that wild fish populations have decreased severely.The once-ubiquitous catfish are harder to find in flooded fields.Fingerlings must either be imported from upstream in Cambodia or bred from eggs in high-tech hatcheries.Landraces of rice can still be found in some local markets; especially in years where rice futures are low, farmers like to grow landraces that require fewer expensive chemical inputs.However, the shift to mechanized agriculture and a high-yield harvesting regime has sent most young men into cities to find work.Knowledge about traditional breeding techniques, names for traditional tools and old landraces are dying with the older generation.Delta society has become more dependent, not less, on actor-networks built around IRRI, national rice research institutes, multinational food corporations, and global trade networks.
However, were farmers from past eras here to observe rice in the present, they might chide us by saying that growing rice has always been a struggle.True, much more land was wilderness before 1900; however, advancements in studying rice genomes have opened up a new world of wilderness at least at the genetic level.While landscapes may show increasing signs of human disturbance, rice and many other organisms such as the brown plant hopper show an incredible ability to evolve and proliferate.Just five grams of seed is sufficient to produce several thousand kilograms of seed in a year or two.In rice's promiscuity then there is at least a continuing potential for wildness.Concerns about loss of genetic biodiversity in rice in the Mekong Delta and elsewhere have prompted a new generation of IRRI and Vietnamese researchers to become bio-prospectors of sorts, gathering surviving strains of old landraces, wild rice (O.rufipogons and O. officinalis), and especially longstem landraces.Rising sea levels, evolving pest ecologies and changing flood patterns challenge today's rice breeders as much as in the past.One might even say that where the seeds of cultivars encapsulate knowledge associated with actor-networks that maintain them, the seeds of wild and weedy species encapsulate the potential for wilderness.A grain-centered view of rice thus not only points to the extensive networks required to sustain it; it also reminds us that the history of rice is a living history.Within rice seeds, rice fields, and rice economies is a persistent, biological tension.