In the late 1950s, shortly after a radical land reform in the northern half of Vietnam, agriculture based on family household farming was gradually reorganized into collective production that took small-scale co-operatives as the main production units. From the early 1960s, agricultural collectivization increased in scale and intensity, based on three key principles: collective ownership of the means of production, centralized management of production, and equal allocation of production output on the basis of points. From the early 1980s, however, a process of decollectivizing agriculture started and continued into the early 1990s (Chu Van Lam et al. 1992). This process went alongside the development of a new land tenure system that clarified three types of substantial rights in land: rights of ownership, rights of management, and rights of use to be held by various holders. At the same time, the state has been implementing the essential programmes of industrialization and modernization in rural areas.

Decollectivization in agriculture in Vietnam has not only led to economic development and diversification but has also increased social differentiation in the countryside (Dang Canh Khanh 1991; Nguyen Van Tiem 1993; Nguyen Xuan Nguyen 1995; Tuong Lai 1995; Nguyen Van Thieu 1995; Hy Van Luong and Unger 1999). One of the aspects of this social differentiation process is inequality among various parties and institutions with regard to access to land at the local level. To this date, different patterns of inequality in land access since decollectivization have been uncovered in some parts of Vietnam. In the Mekong delta, some researchers have highlighted increasing disparities among the local population with regard to access to land use (Nguyen The Nha 1998; Nguyen Dinh Huong 1999; Bui Van Trinh 2000). In Tay Nguyen, scholars have also illustrated the situation in which a large number of indigenous people have lost most or all of their land and forest resources to the hands of the state plantations and new individual comers (Dang Nghiem Van 2002; Vu Dinh Loi 2000).