Land reform in South Vietnam refers to reforms proposed by the United States and implemented by South Vietnam. Seeking to undermine the popularity of the communist Việt Minh's policies of land redistribution to poor peasants, the government of South Vietnam implemented their own land-redistribution policies during the Vietnam War. Before division, Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai in 1953 responded to the Viet Minh program of land redistribution and rent reduction with a decree declaring that rents for land should not exceed 15 percent of the crop. Early reforms enacted by the South Vietnamese government after the division in the 1950s largely failed, as the ordinances prescribed by the government often attempted to directly undo the already-popular land reforms of the Việt Minh, requiring poor peasants to pay to acquire land that the communists had already given to them. During the 1960s, such programs were rendered defunct and unenforceable due to the South Vietnamese army's inability to control farmland territories against the Viet Cong. In the 1970s, South Vietnam implemented the "Land to the Tiller" reform with the aid of the United States. This program was more successful than earlier programs, and was almost entirely underwritten by the United States. The reform program was discontinued in 1975 following South Vietnam's defeat in the Vietnam War and the unification of Vietnam in 1976, which had renamed Saigon as "Ho Chi Minh City" to honor the leader of the Communist Party who declared the country's independence from France after World War II as the August General Uprising against not just the French, but also the Japanese who invaded Indochina back in 1940. Following the unification, the government of Vietnam attempted to carry out further land reform in the southern part of the country in order to develop its transformation to a socialist economy. This attempt at reform was met with difficulties, and did not achieve its goals.
Background Following World War II, the communist Việt Minh (the predecessor of Viet Cong) fought against the French colonialists and their local supporters (mainly landowners) in the First Indochina War. At the time, a large percentage of agricultural land was owned by powerful landowners and the majority of the rural population of Vietnam owned only small plots of land (with little legal assurance) or were simply landless peasants. The early success of the land reform program under the Viet Minh gave the communists a strong base of support among the 80% of the Vietnamese people who lived in rural areas. Prior to the provisional separation of North and South Vietnam, emperor Bao Dai in 1953 responded to the Viet Minh program of land redistribution and rent reduction with a decree declaring that rents for land should not exceed 15 percent of the crop. The decree was unenforceable and rendered null by a failing colonial government and, in any case, contained loopholes that could have been exploited by landlords. From 1954 to 1975 land reform in Vietnam was pursued on two separate channels and regions as the country was provisionally divided into two parts: South Vietnam (The Republic of Vietnam) and North Vietnam (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam), resembling the current partition of Korea. Communist North Vietnam and its southern proxies, the Viet Cong, adopted a policy of confiscating the land of landlords and rich peasants by force and redistributing it to poor and landless peasants, thus organizing the rural population into collectives.
Land reform during the Vietnam War Capitalist South Vietnam failed in several land reform endeavors before finally achieving some success with the "Land to the Tiller" program in the early 1970s that was almost fully devised and supported by the United States, which considered it to be part of their policy of the Vietnamization of the war.
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