Page 1 of 5 Vietnam famine's living legacy
By Geoffrey Gunn
The deaths stemming from the great famine of 1944-45, which reached its zenith
in March-April 1945 in Japanese-occupied northern Vietnam, eclipsed in scale
all human tragedies of the modern period in that country up until that time.
The demographics vary from French estimates of 600,000-700,000 dead, to
official Vietnamese numbers of 1 million to 2 million victims. [1]
Food security is an age-old problem, and dearth, famine, and disease have long
been a scourge of mankind across the broad Eurasian landmass and beyond. While
more recent understandings [2] recognize that famines are mostly man-made, it
is also true that in ecologically vulnerable zones, alongside
natural disasters, war and conflict often tilt the balance between
sustainability and human disaster. [3]
Allowing the contingency of natural cause as a predisposing factor for mass
famine, this article revisits the Vietnam famine of 1944-45 in light of flaws
in human agency (alongside willful or even deliberate neglect) as well as
destabilization stemming from war and conflict. While I avoid the issue of
impacts of the famine in favor of seeking cause - the human suffering of the
famine has not been effaced by time. It was recorded in Hanoi newspapers at the
time. It survives in local memory and in fiction by Vietnamese writers. [4]
The great famine was never construed as a war crime by the Allies, yet the
question of blame, alongside agency or lack of it, was an issue between the
French and the Viet Minh in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese surrender
and entered into propaganda recriminations. Indeed, as written into the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) declaration of independence, both Japan
and France were jointly blamed for the disaster. South Vietnam (the Republic of
Vietnam) also raised the famine issue in postwar reparation negotiations with
Japan.
While such charged issues as the Nanjing Massacre, the comfort women, forced
labor and unit 731 have long been the subject of intense debate in the
historical memory wars, in textbook controversies and in museum exhibits, the
Vietnamese famine, and Japan’s role in creating it, appear to have disappeared
from Japanese war memory and commemoration whether in textbooks or museum
representations.
It may nevertheless be asked, why is it important now to apportion blame? I
would argue that the great Vietnam famine of 1944-45 is at least one of the
underwritten tragedies stemming from the Pacific War. Outside of Vietnam, very
few articles or studies have sought to contextualize this event, whether from
the side of Vietnamese history, or from the perspective of Japanese and/or
French and American responsibility.
No doubt a court of law would seek to distinguish between deliberate policy,
benign neglect, and/or the unanticipated consequences of social action. But,
rather than pinning blame as with a court of law or a war crimes trial, what I
seek here is closer to a truth commission-style investigation that precisely
seeks to uncover a number of thinly veiled truths that could possibly stimulate
further research, not only on war and memory issues related to the famine, but
also in the field of famine prevention.
Background to the famine
The background to the great famine in northern Vietnam is the increasing scale
and character of Japanese military intervention in Indochina from 1940 down to
surrender in September-October 1945. While the Vichy French regime in Indochina
and Japan existed in a tense albeit unequal cohabitation with Japanese forces,
matters changed absolutely on 9 March 1945, when Japan mounted a coup de force,
militarily attacked and interned all French military personal who did not
escape to the mountains, and sequestered all French civilians.
The Japanese military took over full administrative responsibility alongside
local puppet regimes as with the Tran Trong Kim cabinet in Annam, under a
pliant Emperor Bao Dai. Economically, Japan had used Indochina under the Vichy
administration as a source of industrial and food procurement, from coal to
rubber, to a range of industrial crops and, especially rice from the
surplus-producing Mekong delta region.
Though notionally under French administration, Japanese military requisitions
profoundly distorted the colonial political economy, shattered the
import-export system, and eroded many bonds across communities and classes,
sowing the seeds of disasters to come. Even with French administrative services
continuing, including dike repair, the monitoring of agricultural activities,
and the collection of taxes, the rural population, increasingly bereft of cash
as market mechanisms collapsed, was obliged to cope in a situation of virtual
economic autarky just as Indochina came to be subordinated within Japan's
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. [5]
Towards the end of the war, US bombing raids, mounted from India and Yunnan in
China as well as the Philippines, and from carrier-based aircraft, also took a
toll on infrastructure, targeting the TransIndochinois rail line linking north
and south Vietnam, as well as mining harbors and launching submarine raids on
Japanese and local coastal shipping. With all but a few French administrators
behind bars, administrative services deteriorated, both central (run from
Hanoi) and local, whether run from Hanoi, Saigon or Hue.
In this environment, customary rural statistical surveys were rarely conducted.
Japanese military authorities, moreover, paid scant attention to local needs
across Vietnam, not to mention traditionally rice-deficit Laos, and even rice
surplus Cambodia, which was also ruthlessly exploited of its rice resources.
The priority was fulfilling Imperial imperatives designed to feed Japan's own
on the battlefronts and at home.
Colonial famine protection
From time immemorial, coastal Vietnam had suffered frequent droughts, floods,
and typhoons, inflicting misery and suffering. According to Nguyen dynasty
chronicles as interpreted by Ngo Vinh Long, destructive floods occurred on
average every three years, usually around the seventh or eighth months but
sometimes in the fourth and fifth months as well. Prolonged droughts proved
even more disastrous to crops. Added to that were crop failures due to locusts
and other insects. [6]
In official French discourse, protection of the population against threats of
famine was a constant preoccupation of the administration. The colonial
administration did not neglect the new and expanding modern communication links
to re-supply afflicted regions. The need to diversify crop production was not
ignored, given understandings of the risks of monoculture in situations of
crisis and food insufficiency, and close monitoring of agricultural production
and human needs became a finely honed bureaucratic procedure at the local,
regional and federal (Indochinese) levels. Nevertheless, the colonial economy
was above all geared for export of rice, especially from the rice surplus
Mekong River delta area of southern Vietnam.
Writing half a century prior to the great disaster, governor general Jean
Baptiste Paul Beau (October 1902 - February 1908) reflected that there was no
unique solution to the famine problem. One speaks of irrigation works as a
solution, he opined, but Tonkin or northern Vietnam had not generally suffered
drought over a 10-year period commencing in 1896. On the contrary, it had
suffered an excess of water over this period, whether caused by heavy rainfall
or floods. Irrigation systems, he argued, did not have incontestable value and
could only be viewed as a partial solution to the famine problem.
As well understood, several regions in Annam, the central region of Vietnam
with its capital in Hue, supported excessive population densities. Prone to
famine, it was not then possible to render assistance to these remote areas by
either land or sea. At the time of Beau's writing, only northern Annam remained
outside of access to the new colonial railway system. But thanks to the
extension of the rail head to this area, timely rice assistance provided by the
Hue government had helped the population of Thanh-Hoa, then suffering famine.
Similarly, in Annam, wherever the rail head reached, relief could be speedily
arranged.
Alongside new transportation routes, the old system of rice stores that the
imperial government hosted in each of the provinces was deemed a less practical
solution, even though some individuals demanded their restoration. High
population density in parts of Tonkin likewise aggravated the effects of
famine. Alongside experiments in relocating emigrants from Tonkin to western
Cochinchina - as the French called their colony in the south - incentives were
also offered by the administration to peasant cultivators to move away from
rice monoculture. [7]
Throughout the colonial period, a large number of irrigation works were created
in northern and central Vietnam, in particular, using conscript labor and
drawing upon local budgets with both flood control and expanded cultivation as
objectives. [8] Nevertheless, famine did occur in the central provinces of Nghe
An and Ha Tinh in 1930-1931. Combined with falling rice prices and a constant
tax burden, the result was to ignite mass peasant protest along with
communist-inspired attacks on the administration. [9]
It is true that the French introduced a range of plantation or export crops, as
with rubber, tobacco, coffee, etc, but neither, as demonstrated below, did
colonial economic managers ignore the need to maintain a basket of food crops
to tide over emergencies, such as fitting long-established peasant cultivator
practice. [10] Generally, the paix Francais in Indochina was marked by
its managerial response to famine and hunger, even as large numbers of people,
particularly mountain-dwellers and those in more marginal settings, barely
survived in the natural economy.
Managing the food crisis of 1937
Recovering from a low of 960,000 tonnes of rice, unhusked paddy, and rice
derivatives exported from the port of Saigon during 1931, a depression year,
the figure for 1934 rose to 1,505,493 tonnes. Major export markets were, in
rank order, metropolitan France, other French colonies, Hong Kong, and
China-Shanghai. A certain quantity of rice also reached Japan (60,000 tonnes in
1931-32), although still a new and irregular market. Cochinchina and Cambodia
combined provided the overwhelming bulk of rice exports from Indochina and rice
represented 27% of total tonnage exported, contributing up to 36% of total
value of exports. [11]
By 1937, rice exports from Indochina had fallen, owing to a generalized drought
caused by a delay in the arrival of the monsoon rains which affected a wide
swathe of territory from southern Tonkin, to northern Annam, north and central
Laos, and even the northeast of Siam. As a remedial measure, the colonial
administration, now under the socialist Popular Front government of Leon Blum,
imposed a total ban on the export of rice from Laos (including rice surplus
Bassac in the south), while seeking to reserve all quantities of rice for local
consumption.
With northern Annam suffering a marked lack of precipitation, especially in
Vinh and Than-Hoa provinces, 50,000 piasters was earmarked for distribution of
rice to victims. In order to prevent speculation on existing stocks of rice,
the administration opened a 40,000-piaster line of credit with the official
small loan institution, Credit Agricole Mutual, a measure seen as helping to
regulate the price of rice. Answering to the Minister of Colonies in France,
the Indochina government reported monitoring the situation with "extreme
caution", [12] and this is borne out by the facts.
In early 1937, a number of locales in Thanh Hoa were drastically affected by
poor harvests leading to a certain "malaise" (read, major discontent) on the
part of the affected population. No doubt with memories of 1931-32 in mind, the
authorities did not stand idly by. A series of public works projects, roads
especially, were created offering indigent peasant farmers a stipend to cover
their needs. This was not a small investment but translated into 192,000 paid
workdays. Roads and bridges in the view of the authorities would open new
markets, thus satisfying demand on the part of the population. More than that,
the extra income earned would enable peasant-workers to purchase rice-seeds
ready for planting in the next season. In the words of an official rapporteur,
"Misery was banished owing to the generous support of the government and the
agricultural rhythm reestablished in the best conditions while allowing even
the most disinherited to receive support." [13]
Pressed by Paris and the governor general, the French resident superior in
Hanoi scrambled to take stock of food reserves in Tonkin by conducting a
province-level investigation. As the top French official concluded, the
soudure, or gap, between the intervening harvests was not at a critical level
in Tonkin. His investigation disclosed that 566,217 tonnes of rice were held in
reserve (stockpiled), amounting to some 56,000 tonnes in excess of (annual)
consumption needs of 510,310 tonnes. To this was added approximately 22,500
tonnes of maize, along with a reserve of secondary items of everyday
consumption, including potatoes, soy beans, manioc, and taro, "which also makes
up an appreciable part of the diet of the indigenous population", albeit an
amount difficult to accurately calculate owing to the small-scale or household
character of its production. [14]
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road,
Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
