The changing role of water buffalo in rural Vietnam

Abstract

Vietnam is rapidly industrializing, and many of the rural agriculturally-based communities in the periphery are no exception. On the flatter lands around Hanoi and more heavily populated areas in some of the provinces to north of the capital for example, the gasoline powered tractor is replacing the labour of the water buffalo. Additionally, as the population demands more meat in its diet, water buffalo are now raised for human consumption, often in pens, rather than for power needed for agricultural cultivation.  Indeed, as in the case of Chiem Hoa district in the Tuyen Quang province, what was once the plough has become a marketable and commodified brand of meat. Stated otherwise, an animal that was once common-place, interacted with daily, prized for its intelligence, decried for its stubbornness, and was considered by many across the countryside as another working member of the family, now seems somewhat exotic or has been reduced to simply another source of consumable protein.

This chapter centres the water buffalo as a living framework to explore the complex social, cultural, environmental, and economic histories of the people of Chiem Hoa district in the Tuyen Quang province and by inference rural Vietnam.  While the trope of economic progression dominates the academic literatures of rural development, this study focuses on structural changes in the economy notwithstanding. This present that agriculture in Vietnam is mechanizing and industrializing, and as it does generations of shared history between rural people and their most valued animal is being altered forever.