1 Introduction

Our article aims to explore why farmers in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) refused to participate in the local government’s cooperative in the context of disaster recovery. This research question arose from the post-disaster context where the local government of Tan Hung commune, Long Phu district, Soc Trang province of the VMD attempted to use this initiative to bring isolated households together and to increase their collective capacity to negotiate price and rice deals with buyers. This goal was important because farmers in Tan Hung and other provinces of the VMD were considered to be in a very weak position in the entire food supply chains that had left them at the mercy of powerful stakeholders, including merchants and brokers—who buy their products and sell them to companies or wholesale buyers (Demont and Rutsaert 2017; Tran 2018). Farmers largely depended on a “good season” without natural hazards or rice pests to be able to enter into an “equal” negotiation with buyers (Nguyen-Trung 2021). This weak status resulted in worse consequences in late 2015 and early 2016 when a historic drought and saline intrusion heavily hit the community and destroyed farmers’ third rice crop or "crop 3" (Mai et al. 2018). In this complicated situation, farmers were left alone to “eat” most of the farming and natural hazard risks that confronted the rice supply chains. Vietnam has introduced its new Cooperative Law in 2012 that aims to revitalise agricultural cooperatives. Under this reform, cooperatives have been found effective in helping farmers leverage their status and access to market (Van Phuong et al. 2020; Tran et al. 2021). Against this backdrop, it appears rational for farmers to join the cooperatives initiated by the government to reinforce their collective power in the food supply chains. However, this was not the case. After 2 years of implementation, the government’s initiative was a failure, with the cooperative existing only on paper and failing to attract farmers to join. Farmers refused the government initiatives and “chose” to stick to their individual cultivating routine, which further locked them into a position vulnerable to market and natural hazard risks.

This situation urges us to problematise the current literature on social capital in disaster recovery. It is widely acknowledged that social capital plays a crucial role in helping the affected communities bounce back in the aftermath of a disaster (Aldrich 2011a, b; Bhakta Bhandari 2014; Masud-All-Kamal and Hassan 2018; Hsueh 2019). People often turn to their close networks (bonding social capital), such as families, friends, or neighbours who live nearby, to seek social support and speed up their recovery (Wickes et al. 2015; Masud-All-Kamal and Hassan 2018). In some locations, people also relied on bridging social capital, such as local clubs (Chamlee-Wright and Storr 2009) or relationships with agricultural input suppliers (Nguyen-Trung et al. 2020) to facilitate their recovery. Yamamura’s (2013) study examining the lives of people after the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake (1995) in Japan revealed that the affected communities tended to invest more in social capital as the earthquake made individuals realise the importance of social capital in disasters. However, social capital is not the remedy for every need required for recovery and building disaster resilience. For instance, in a study of the formation of recovery groups to support people with unmet urgent needs in Hurricane Irene affected communities on the East Coast of the US, Consoer and Milman (2016) found that out of 10 groups, all three state collaboratives were not as effective because they failed to attract people’s participation. This situation shows that not every attempt at investing in and using social capital is successful, and there are deeply rooted reasons that affect the decision and participation of disaster-affected groups in longer-term collaborative efforts, especially those founded or led by governments. Disaster literature has shown that patronage relationships and bribery (Islam et al. 2017), trust in governments (Joshi and Aoki 2014), governments’ coordination and communication capacity, and their leaders’ political wills (Raju and Van Niekerk 2013) are essential in determining the effectiveness of collaboration in disaster recovery. However, most of these studies often limited their studies within the present timeframe, which makes it unclear if those mentioned factors are driven by larger social forces lying in the socio-cultural structures of the affected society (Birkmann 2006; Nguyen-Trung 2019, 2022). Answering this question points toward the question of what disaster root causes are or what social vulnerabilities are affecting the current state of community resilience (Blakie et al. 1994; Wisner et al. 2004). This gap aligns with the above-mentioned question arising from our case study because both require us to deep dive into the latent social structures of affected communities and find the root causes in the historical processes.

To do so, we use Critical Disaster Studies perspectives to critically examine how larger social forces predispose these communities to greater disaster risks (Oliver-Smith 2013, 2022; Matthewman and Uekusa 2022). Critical Disaster Studies is defined as an approach that helps “disclose how culturally patterned and socially generated behaviours and practices such as racism or sexism function in the uneven distribution of risk, vulnerability and disaster impact, are equally generated by structural causes and associated practices” (Oliver-Smith 2022, pp. 28–29). Oliver-Smith (1999) illustrates this approach with a study of the 1970 Peruvian earthquake by tracing the disaster's beginnings back 500 years. In the previous works (Nguyen-Trung 2019; Nguyen-Trung and Le 2023), we suggested that Vietnam’s rice intensification and irrigation policies dated back to Vietnam’s reunification (1975) forced farmers in Soc Trang province to cultivate a winter–spring rice crop (or crop 3) in the dry season and therefore suffered from recent drought and saline intrusion in 2015–2016 and 2019–2020. We also found out that farmers’ aesthetic reflexivity (Nguyen-Trung 2022) helped understand farmers’ unique risk perception and motivation to engage in risky cropping and why they took responsibility for their disastrous losses to the 2015–2016 disasters (Nguyen-Trung 2023). Building on these studies and applying the Critical Disaster Studies approach, we further explored the root causes of farmers’ vulnerability in relation to farmer–state relationships and their efforts to build resilience in the post-disaster context.

We draw on a case study of disaster-affected Tan Hung commune to examine what and how socio-cultural structures would shape farmers’ refusal of the state’s cooperative. This rural community had a largely rice-based economy with a triple rice cropping system, meaning cultivating three rice crops a year, starting from crop 1 (summer–autumn), crop 2 (autumn–winter), and crop 3 (spring–summer). This cropping structure makes local farmers exposed to a range of disasters, especially droughts and saline intrusion in the dry season. In the sections that follow, we start by describing the study context and the study method. In the result section, we first demonstrate how disaster vulnerability is constituted by the current food supply chains and merchant–farmer relationships, and then turn to explore how farmers’ decisions and actions are, particularly, shaped by the historic processes of state–farmer relationships and the collective trauma that the government’s command-and-control approach caused. In our analysis, we will not cover general vulnerability theory and traditional vulnerability factors (e.g. socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, and education), as these have been extensively covered in the disaster literature.

2 Study context

This paper draws on the qualitative data that are part of larger study examining disaster vulnerability among rural farmers in Tan Hung commune (see Fig. 1) following a historic disaster occurred in 2015–2016. It was reported that, in late 2014, an El Niño-induced drought hit Vietnam. This drought lasted for over 20 months until mid-2016. The drought, induced by the El Niño phenomenon in late 2014, postponed the wet season (from May to November) and prolonged the dry season (from December to April), leading to the dramatic decrease in rainfall and water flow levels of the Mekong River. As this drought went on, it reduced the rainfall and intensified the dry season’s saline intrusion. As a result, salinity intruded a further 20–30 km inland compared to the previous years, and the level of salt concentration in river water exceeded the hazard peaks in 1998, 2005, and 2010 (Mai et al. 2018). In response, local authorities must close sluice gates in order to prevent saltwater from being distributed onto farms through canal systems. This decision came into effect in January–April 2016 (the period when crop 3 was in the development and harvest stage). As a result, crop 3 was heavily damaged because of the lack of freshwater. Some local farmers tried to save their crops by illegally pumping salinity-affected river water onto their farms. However, this act was only to cause more damage to crop 3 because rice could not cope with saltwater.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Tan Hung commune in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta

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Tan Hung, a rural commune that was home to 12,084 people with 3078 household, was one of the most disaster-affected areas with 20.9% of the commune total households (645) reporting a 30–100% loss of their crop 3 (Nguyen-Trung 2021). Thanks to this loss, the whole commune’s annual agricultural production decreased from 48,722 tonnes in 2015 to just 33,381 tonnes in 2016. Under the effects of the 2015–2016 disaster, total poor households and near-poor households in Tan Hung commune increased from 464 and 207 households by late 2014 to 531 and 222 households by late 2016, respectively. This means an increase of 12.2% from a total of 671 poor and near-poor households by late 2014. The government spent nearly 1.6 billion Vietnamese Dong (approximately US $70,000) to support the affected households in Tan Hung commune, which was the highest amount of support among the 11 towns and communes of the Long Phu district. The Vietnamese Mekong Delta suffered the most among Vietnam’s economic regions, contributing 89.6% of Vietnam’s rice crop losses (244,000 ha) (Nguyen-Trung 2021). On the national level, the disaster widely impacted over 80% of total provinces and cities in Vietnam, forcing 18 provinces to ask for emergency support from national and international organisations (United Nations 2016).

3 Methodology

This study uses the qualitative dataset produced in the larger project, which was designed as a case study by the lead author (Yin 2014). Our study did not aim to generalise findings to the whole population of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta; instead, it aimed to conduct an “exemplary case study” that helps illuminate a discovery of why and how the chosen disaster-affected farming community in the rural, coastal commune of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta was reluctant to participate in the local government’s agricultural cooperative. Between February and December 2018, the lead author conducted 49 interviews (see Table 1), including semi-structured interviews with 28 disaster-impacted farm households living in two villages of Tan Hung in Long Phu district, Soc Trang province of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta and key informant interviews with 21 stakeholders.

Table 1 Interview profile.
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Households were selected using a purposive sampling strategy (Patton 2002), which determined selection criteria that helped choose the households that suffered the most from the 2015–2016 disaster. The lead author consulted with local authorities and used the list of households receiving relief funds in the 2015–2016 disaster and the list of poor and near-poor households in Tan Hung commune in 2017 to assist in his selection. As such, a household was selected if they cultivated crop 3 during the dry season, which made them prone to drought and saline intrusion, especially in the 2015–2016 disaster. The selection process was also based on the diverse poverty status of local households. In this study, two categories of household poverty were considered: (1) non-poor households, and (2) poor and near-poor households. This classification was based on the poverty line laid out by Decision Number 59/2015/QD-TTg by the Prime Minister of Vietnam in 2015, which indicates that the poor and near-poor households are those that have an average monthly income of 1 million Vietnamese Dong (around US $40) or below, with a lack of access to basic social services including healthcare and education. Household interviews were carried out in their homes or in places at the participants’ request such as their shops.

In addition, key informant interviews with stakeholders, including officials, agricultural input suppliers, socio-political organisations, village heads, and experts, produced useful qualitative data for understanding the social context of farmers’ vulnerability (Vickery 2018). These interviews were conducted in a variety of settings, such as offices for government officials, participants’ houses for local staff, and socio-political organisations. These stakeholders were selected based on their roles that allowed them to be involved in the disaster risk management processes or the social and historical context of the disaster-affected commune. As such, local authorities were selected in accordance with the three administrative levels of Vietnam’s government, from provincial to district-level and commune-level staff. In addition, the lead author also interviewed representatives from socio-political organisations such as the Women’s Union, Farmers’ Union, Elderly’s Association, and Fatherland Front, heads of villages—a settlement unit under the management of a commune-level government, and agricultural input suppliers to allow cross-checking of information provided by farm households. All the interviews were conducted in Vietnamese, and all the interviews were transcribed and translated into English by the lead author for qualitative analysis.

The interview data were transcribed, cleaned, and imported into NVivo—a Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS)—for qualitative analysis (Woolf and Silver 2017). While the larger project (Nguyen-Trung 2021) examined a variety of topics including the impact of disaster, farmers’ perception of disaster risk, coping and recovery mechanisms, and farmers’ social capital, this study focuses on the key question of why farmers refused the state’s attempt to organise them into agricultural cooperatives following the 2015–2016 drought and saline intrusion. This case contained many interview questions that explored why these farmers were locked into a permanent position of vulnerability, touching on the topics of farmers’ experience with cooperative, their disaster recovery efforts and challenges, and their lack of access to rice market, especially their social support, trust and relationships with governments. We employed thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006) to identify and generate themes after a process of becoming familiar with the data, generating initial codes from the data in accordance with the research questions, and reflective discussion among authors. The lead author conducted initial coding, shared these codes with the other two authors so that the whole team could discuss and refine the codes, generate and refine the themes. The data analysis led to the generation of the themes of farmers’ lack of economic, cultural, and social resources and capacities in organising their crop production. Tracing these themes led us to the examination of economic, social, political, and cultural layers of vulnerability that placed farmers at risk of disasters in this particular case. By 15 December 2017, the study's ethics application (Project number 11022) has been created, submitted to, and accepted by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (MUHREC). Pseudonyms are used in this analysis to protect participants’ anonymity.

4 Results

4.1 Farmers’ economic vulnerability

4.1.1 Food production hierarchy

In response to the historic loss, it is natural for farmers to be reflexive on identifying the causes making them vulnerable to disasters (Nguyen-Trung 2023). While acknowledging the abnormal magnitude of the 2015–2016 drought and saline intrusion, farmers were aware of their vulnerable position in the global rice production chain hierarchy. They reflexively reflected on being locked in a permanent position of vulnerability even before this historic disaster occurred. One farmer summed up this idea: “Even if we’ve produced ample products [without disaster], the market’s unexpected ups and downs are the final determinant … We’re the slave of the market. It decides it all. The market instability is the biggest threat” (Bich, 55, male, village head). This opinion revealed small-scale farmers’ powerlessness in (global) food supply chains: They do not have adequate access to and control over the market (see also Hingley and Lindgreen 2010). The dependence on the (rice) market signifies the vulnerable position of farmers in (global) rice value chains. Bau Duc (78, male farmer) explained this position clearly when using the metaphor of 10 rice seeds:

If you produce, from paddy cultivation, 10 rice seeds in total, you would lose one seed for fertiliser and pesticide. Then, one seed for labourers whom we hire to harvest paddy using cutting machines. Then, another seed for brokers. Next one more seed for merchants who, to pay for intermediary fee for brokers, must downgrade our paddy price. So, we already lost four seeds [out of ten before we could get to our final benefit].

This metaphor portrays the inequality in the agricultural value chain structure: Farmers are important but powerless actors placed at the bottom of the hierarchy who depend on the control of other stakeholders in global rice value chain (see also Oxfam 2018; Segal and Minh 2019). This is even more problematic in the Vietnamese context since farmers as producers could not sell their paddy directly to wholesalers and rice exporters. Those wholesalers and exporters do not buy paddy from individual farm households; they rely on intermediaries such as merchants and brokers to gather these outputs in large quantity for them and millers who sell them processed rice (i.e. separation of rice husks).

Merchants (thương lái/lái buôn), as observed in many studies (e.g. Tran 2018), often moved across provinces in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta searching for paddy sellers. As they came from other regions, they were often not familiar with local paddy cultivation. They neither knew where specific varieties of paddy were cultivated nor which farmers had a large quantity of paddy for sale. This was where brokers became crucial because they were often local farmers who had strong social networks with farmers in localities. More importantly, they were knowledgeable of local geography, paddy production, and fields and often were highly regarded for their large land holding or success in rice production. In many cases, dealers/brokers (cò) played a key role of intermediary in connecting farmers to merchants. Sometimes, brokers also stockpile paddy from farmers and sell them to merchants. Similar to observations in other studies (e.g. Demont and Rutsaert 2017), after buying paddy from farmers/brokers, merchants sold the paddy to millers, then from there rice was sold to wholesalers and/or exporters. An estimate reported that only 4.2% of total paddy was directly sold to exporters, while the remaining was sold to intermediaries such as collectors and millers (Pham and La 2014). As such, the farm gate price of rice (i.e. the price of paddy sold by farmers) and farmers’ profit from rice sales were very low compared to other actors in the value chain structure (Coxhead et al. 2012; Tran et al. 2013). Furthermore, merchants (and other powerful actors) can use a supplier diversification strategy to build resilience of food supply chains in case of crop pests or natural hazards (Hertel et al. 2021), while farmers are often left with no option other than cultivating what they can and hoping that merchants will buy from them.

4.1.2 Merchant–farmer vertical relationships

Despite the fees given to brokers, small-scale farmers needed these agents and needed to work in this global system because farmers could not connect or negotiate with merchants on their own. Chuyen (40, male farmer) explained why farmers become dependent on brokers:

Here, we hire brokers for almost every production task from sowing to harvesting…[T]he role of brokers is important because of their power in negotiation with merchants [—what we could not do]. Their good negotiation skills could help us get a better price... When merchants come to buy paddy, brokers have managed to assemble all paddy with one price only [italics added].

Despite this weakness of farmers and the domination of merchants, local authorities did not provide enough safety nets. Although there is a system of agricultural extension services (khuyến nông) established at all government levels (central, provincial, district, commune, and village) as seen in other studies (e.g. Pham and Babu 2018), their support in aiding Tan Hung farmers in selling produce was indeed limited or non-existent. Interviews with farmers revealed no support given to farmers in dealing with merchants or in connecting them with buyers. With the lack of support from the government and the underdevelopment of private markets, farmers were left to face merchants by themselves and remain powerless in the crop production hierarchy.

In this respect, merchants appeared to be an immediate dominant force in deciding the market price of paddy produce, and this vertical merchant–farmer power relationship affects farmers’ experience. One official clearly pointed out the weakness of farmers in Tan Hung commune:

In agriculture nowadays, any crop is facing a difficulty in selling outputs. In Dong Nai province, they got the support from enterprises and developed marketplaces, but here we do not have such a luxury. This is the problem facing the whole province [Soc Trang], not just our district [Long Phu]. Here, merchants [lái] decide the price (Quy, 40, male farmer).

Merchants applied many rules that constrained farmers from gaining benefits from crop production. For instance, merchants only buy high-quality paddy on a large scale. Meeting the quality and quantity standards is a challenge for all farmers, but especially those who are poor and small scale. Interviews revealed that poor farmers often did not have the level of knowledge or techniques that ensured high productivity of paddy production, as did non-poor farmers. This was one of the reasons why Rieng (48, female farmer) was so concerned about market risks: “If the crop isn’t successful [low productivity/quality], we can’t sell paddy. They [the merchants] would say the quality of paddy is too bad so that they wouldn’t buy them”. This finding is consistent with some studies which point out that the lack of investment in certified products that hampers farmers from conformity to sustainable production standards such as GlobalGAP (Global Good Agricultural Practices) and VietGAP (Vietnamese Good Agricultural Practices) (Demont and Rutsaert 2017: 12). This insufficiency had placed them in a vulnerable position in selling their paddy, and more critically instilled the psychological mindset of disadvantage when dealing with merchants and brokers who are deemed to have greater market power over rice farmers (Tran 2018).

Farmers faced a greater challenge in meeting the quantity of paddy for sale. Ben said (37, male farmer),

Merchants these days only buy paddy in a large quantity, say, hundreds of congs [1 cong = 0.1 hectar or 1000 square meters]. If you’ve got 100 congs, they’d buy; otherwise, with just 10 congs, you can’t sell to them. You have to sell by combining your paddy with other farmers.

It was rare for one farm household, even non-poor ones, to possess and cultivate an area of as large as 100 congs. Poor and near-poor farmers confronted an even more serious barrier because of their low productivity. It was reported that poor farmers often produced less yield per cong than did non-poor farmers. For instance, household interviews showed that, in 2017, poor and near-poor farmers produced 3.87 tonne/ha, 4.55 tonne/ha, and 5.85 tonne/ha for crop 1, crop 2, and crop 3, respectively. These comparative figures for non-poor households were 6.09, 6.10, and 8.37 tonne/ha, respectively.

Facing difficulties to meet those standards, farmers often faced with the possible breaking of a buying deal by merchants. At the early phase of crop cultivation, merchants start looking for paddy to buy. They could place a deposit (đặt cọc) to buy paddy from rice fields that they thought to be potentially successful. To enact the deal, they must deposit an amount of approximately 200,000 Vietnamese Dong (about US $8.6) per standard cong. In doing so, merchants and farmers reach an informal agreement on buying/selling a certain area of paddy crop at a certain price after harvesting. This informal form of contract implies that even if the market price changes (either increasing or decreasing) at the time of harvesting, they would still proceed the sale on the agreed price. For merchants, this deal ensures that they can buy a sufficient quantity of paddy, while, for farmers, it ensures that they can successfully sell their paddy, regardless of market fluctuation. In theory, if farmers break the deal, then they must pay back the deposit to merchants, whereas, if merchants break the deal, they lose the deposit. However, in reality, farmers are still in a vulnerable position because merchants are more likely to break the deal if: (1) The deposit price is higher than the market price at the time of harvesting; (2) the quality of paddy is bad due to damage from disasters, pests, or pathogens; and (3) the quantity of paddy collected is less than anticipated at the time of deposit due to damage. Despite the foreseeable risks, farmers still needed such a deposit agreement to increase the chance of immediately selling their paddy after harvesting because they lacked storage facilities for protecting the produce from being damaged by rain or mice predation.

Farmers’ vulnerabilities attributable to rice value chains became exacerbated when the 2015–2016 disaster hit Tan Hung commune. While the drought dried out canals and rivers, the saline intrusion forced local authorities to close sluice gates to prevent further contaminating rice fields. Waterway including canal systems and rivers were blocked. In this condition, merchants and brokers must use roads as the only way of transportation. Roads in the locality were often too small for big trucks to get access to farms. These complex environmental conditions compelled merchants and brokers to charge farmers an extra transportation fee. This caused a further decline in the paddy price of crop 3, whose productivity was already heavily affected by the disaster. This shows the influence of power on the sharing of risks and loses in the crop production hierarchy.

4.2 Farmers’ socio-cultural vulnerability

4.2.1 Lack of collaboration and state’s current attempts to (re)build social capital

Up to the time of lead author’s fieldwork in 2018, farmers in Tan Hung did not develop any collective efforts to organise large-scale crop production. From the government perspective, Co (55, male official) cited the lack of collaboration in cropping calendar as the main difficulty for their water and irrigation management:

Local farmers start their crops at different times. There could be areas ready for harvesting, there could be others not ready. If you go sightseeing this area, you’ll see there are places where rice seeds are being sowed, other areas rice crops are ripening, or elsewhere rice crops are being harvested.

This voluntary way of plantation derived from an individual working pattern where farmers often ran their business spontaneously on their own. Vot (48, male farmer) explained:

Farmers in this area cannot work together. They have been sticking to the habit of small-scale production. Here, there is a lack of organisation who could coordinate farmers, helping them discuss with each other.

This showed an absence of social capital that could help farmers to reduce production costs and increase their produce quality. Habits of individual working patterns were cited as one of the reasons:

It was hard to collaborate with each other because local households… did not want to sow paddy seed in row [drilling]. They have been familiar with irregularly broadcasting seeds on soil and do not want to change this pattern. The benefit of working together is huge. We can use the same pesticide and do it at the same time so that it is more effective to prevent pests…. If we drilled seed together, we could increase productivity and quality, and sell our produce at better price. Companies would buy outputs from us. However, farm households have been hesitant in trying drilling seeds because this method wastes more household labour and time, and required an investment in a sowing machine. (Man, 78, male farmer)

There were a few cases where several households, whose rice fields are adjacent, collaborated with each other in selling rice. However, this collaboration was only on small scale and did not make much difference on the commune level. On the large scale, farmers lacked a union, which would have given them the power to speak for themselves, and they tended to deal with buyers and the market system on their own as observed in other studies (Demont and Rutsaert 2017; Ba et al. 2019). Nonetheless, the lack of collaboration does not just reflect the lack of social capital among farmers. It is more important to see this as a matter of cultural, historical, and political processes, which helps explain why a simple one-off command-and-control approach to engineer social capital among them does not work.

The cultural habit was demonstrated at best in the case of forming an agricultural cooperative in Tan Hung commune from late 2016 to early 2017. As stated by the local official, the cooperative formation policy originated from the Law on Cooperative No. 23/2012/QH13 issued in 2012 by Vietnam’s National Assembly. Although this revision represented a breakthrough in simplifying administrative procedures in comparison with the 1997’s and 2003’s versions, the growth of cooperatives remained stagnant because of their ineffectiveness in assisting members diversify their activities, improving agricultural produce, and better accessing export markets (Cox and Le 2014). The need of agricultural cooperative became a strong urge after the 2015–2016 disaster. Recognising the importance of having a farmer’s organisation who could help represent farmers in dealing with the imbalanced power relations, Tan Hung government attempted to form an agricultural cooperative in late 2016 and early 2017. This project was piloted in Village A—home to Kinh ethnicity, with the participation on document of initial 20 households, whose land holding was 31 ha in total. While this selection was controversial because of its neglect of other villages, especially those that are Khmer ethnicity, this cooperative had a good intention. It attempts to transfer technical knowledge to farmers through training courses with Tan Hung’s Centre for Agricultural Extension Services would directly organise trainings to farmers.

Apart from raising awareness and educating, the cooperative’s important goal was to assist farmers stay organised and reduce their vulnerability to the imbalanced power relationships. The cooperative had the goal to get farmers together in forming small group cooperation, then acting as a whole cooperative. For instance, the cooperative would organise its members to start sowing their crop at specific times so that their production is in harmony. For instance, on the same rice field, farmers of the rice plots that are close to the road or canal would be the one who sows first, while those of rice plots located furthest from the transportation would be the one sowing later. In the harvesting time, paddy will ripe in order so that farmers can harvest paddy from outside first, without the fear of letting the inside paddy be overripe. As such, the cooperative aimed to create solidarity among farmers’ groups in rice crop production, not just for the harvesting and sale period. It aimed to help farmers reinforce their collective power in the rice value chain by putting them in big production of rice with high-quality produces. This cooperation could result in more power for farmers to negotiate with buyers and eventually in more profit to farmers and cut the input cost. By contrast, if farmers remain working individually, it would be very hard for them to gain profit because of the high input cost and the low sale price due to the lack of negotiation power in facing merchants.

The cooperative was to help its members increase their profit and share farming and disaster risks. Therefore, it is rational for farmers to join this cooperative in order to address their vulnerability. However, after 2 years since its establishment, the cooperative remained ineffective with the lack of participation from farm households. According to study participants, they did not join any activities organised by the cooperative for various reasons. Here, we discuss three major reasons for their “irrational” behaviours: (1) the collective trauma of past policies and (2) increasing distrust in authorities.

4.2.2 Farmers’ collective trauma of cooperative failure

One of the reasons why farmers did not believe the cooperative policy would bring them success was their fear of past political tragedy. This collective trauma was caused by the collectivisation policy that Vietnam implemented in post-reunification from 1975 to 1985 (see Nguyen-Trung and Le 2023 for an overview). In this decade, the country was based on the centrally planned economy—a model derived from Marxist-Leninist ideologies. The economy was highly controlled and driven by one-party state with the political leadership of the Vietnamese Communist Party (CPV). In response to a prolonged food crisis, in years after the reunification, farming in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta in particular and Vietnam in general focused on building “subsistence farming and household food security” (Can 2011: 2). From 1976 to 1991, CPV addressed food security first as the “foremost problem” (CPV’s Fourth National Congress), then “the most pressing and basic problem” (Fifth National Congress), and “the number one, vital-for-survival focus” (Sixth National Congress), strongly associated with national defence and security (CPV 1977, 1982, 1987). The CPV began to sow this idea in the Fourth National Congress (CPV 1977): “To highly concentrate all the strengths of the whole country, of branches and levels to create an outstanding development in agriculture… in order to firmly address the national demand for food” (CPV 1977). In this general policy, rice cultivation and intensification were considered to be the leading activity, being designated to be developed in key rice-specialised areas (vùng trọng điểm lúa) (CPV 1977) or high-yield rice areas (CPV 1982). The state strongly propagandised its “rice everywhere” campaign and an “all rice strategy” especially after suffering from the severe flood of 1978 (Biggs et al. 2009) and food shortages in the 1980s (Hoanh et al. 2003; Tuong et al. 2003). In this context, the VMD’s role was of the most importance in rice production and national food security. The region’s status was uplifted from just as “a potentially important rice bowl” (CPV 1977) to the “the largest commodity rice producer” (CPV 1987).

To realise the rice intensification policy, the one-party state reinforced its power by enforcing agricultural collectivisation policy. This policy, being implemented from 1975 to 1985, used agricultural cooperatives to regiment farmers, forcing them to give up their private land rights and work for the collective interests rather than for their individual needs. Individuals and households had no access to economic capital including land tenure rights, their production inputs such as fertiliser and pesticides. Their access to social capital was controlled by agricultural cooperatives with a limited chance of building their own networks with other agents in the agricultural market such as input suppliers or output buyers. The vertical social capital (between officials, agricultural cooperatives, and farmers) overpowered horizontal social capital. The agricultural collectivisation policies were less strict and efficient in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta than in Vietnam northern regions as just 5.9 per cent of farmers in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta joining the cooperatives and in a shorter period (3–4 years) (Pingali and Xuan 1992; Ravallion and Van de Walle 2008; Phong 2014). Farmers in this area also attempted to breach the state’s prohibition of land transfer/sale as they “transferred their land to others (sang đất) by just giving each other a handwritten agreement (thỏa thuận giấy tay)” (Long, 64, male farmer). Such voluntary practices by local farmers may have been the result of their experiences under the Republic of Vietnam government (1955–1975) in the South whose policies were based on a private system rather than the collective system executed in the North.

Under the collectivisation policy, farmers did not have their own economic interests and encouragement in investing in crop production and were forced to serve the state-supported cooperative habitus. This resulted in a sharp decline from 7 million tonnes before reunification to just 6 million tonnes right after (Pingali and Xuan 1992: 706). Agricultural production failed to produce enough food for its citizen, pushing the country deeply into a comprehensive crisis that saw them facing high inflation rates, extreme poverty, food shortage, and even famine (Cazzuf et al. 2017). From 1975 to 1988, the country encountered several food crises that made it a net rice importer (Pingali and Xuan 1992). This caused collective trauma among rice farmers.

The 1986 reform helped turn the centrally planned economy into a market-oriented socialist economy under state guidance (Beresford 2008). With the de-collectivisation policy, farmers were liberated from agricultural cooperatives and given access to their own lands by a series of land laws. The trauma and reform were well remembered by farmers. Ro (66, male farmer) remembered that obtaining his own field in the late 1980s gave him and his family much more freedom in dividing and assigning land to others. Under the changes, Bong Ro and his fellow farmers had a better access to one of the most important economic capital in rice production: land. Since the state assigning land to farmers on lease terms of 15 or 20 years, they felt much more assured of land security. Additionally, they could privately own the means of production such as machines, animals, and tools (Marsh et al. 2006: 17).

4.2.3 Farmers’ lack of trust in authorities and their top-down approach

With the history of cooperative failure, farmers have been left with collective trauma and distrust in authorities. Therefore, although the land reform has changed farmers’ incentives, they are still in fear of government’s command-and-control authoritarian approach. Long (male, farmer) noted:

The negative legacy from the previous period when the people joining cooperatives is still felt. People had no rights. Now if the cooperative follows the law in 2012, joining is voluntary; the state does not interfere; cooperative’s members have equal rights and receive support from each other; they have a right to withdraw if they do not find it right. However, the formation of our cooperative [in 2017] was not effective in conveying these law articles to farmers. So, it has failed.

The lack of effective communication from the beginning has led to farmers’ misunderstanding of the state’s plan and their lack of participation. The operation of the cooperative was thus only on paper rather than creating any specific activities. Yet a bigger cause was that farmers seemingly refused to contribute to the state-owned cooperative. Duc, an experienced farmer, cited the lack of trust in the government’s current policy as the reason for farmers’ decisions:

Here, province-, district-, and commune-level governments organised many meetings in 2016 to promote the cooperative and motivate farmers to join it, but local farmers did not dare to join. Because they have seen through television that the cooperative formed in An Giang province only helped their members in the first crop season. From the second one, they cut farmers’ profit, and the management board forced to buy farmers’ produce at lower prices… Or they had made the contract with buying companies but then when farmers harvested their produce, these companies did not buy the produce… Now the cooperative has gone. Farmers lost trust in the government’s cooperation. As such, when the government urged farmers to join, they cited the failure in An Giang for why they would not do it.

Duc’s opinion painted a broader picture of Vietnam’s agriculture in recent years since the Law of Cooperative in 2012. This law attempted to revitalise a collectivised agricultural model the state had experimented in the pre-reform period (1976–1985). There have been many agricultural cooperatives being formed under this movement. Yet this movement faces a significant challenge as it evokes farmers’ trauma. Farmers fear falling into the same trap they once did. And this fear was understandable in the case of Tan Hung’s farmers.

In parallel with the establishment of the cooperative, the local government also encouraged farmers to stop the third rice crop. Ka Co (a provincial official) commented that Tan Hung and many other communes in Soc Trang province often suffer from a lack of freshwater and annual saline instrusion in the dry season. As such, cultivating crop 3 in this season would repeat the same disaster. However, as government issued this recommendation, farmers appeared to oppose it. From farmer’s perspective, if they stop crop 3, they would lose an important source of income because crop 3 yields much more than crop 1 and 2 do. This conflict proved to be very serious and critical to farmers’ opposition to the idea of the agricultural cooperative. Long (male, farmer) recognised the difference between the government’s and farmers’ wills:

Currently, the cooperative is not so effective because the district government does not encourage farmers to cultivate rice crop 3. By contrast, members who have land do not know what else to do if they do not cultivate crop 3. If the weather is right, they got money to prepare for the crop, they farmers will cultivate it. As such, the cooperative is not effective because if it runs as farmers wish, they will go against the will of the district government. If the cooperative follows the district government’s instruction, they will be against farmers’ will. For farmers living here, if they do not plant crop 3, they will go through four months with no job, no income. They cannot live within that scenario.

This conflict seemed to derive from the state’s top-down approach, which ignored farmer’s needs and vulnerability—farmers need to take risks for better outcomes rather than accepting a safer plan.

The government also tried to drag farmers away from crop 3, encouraging them to consider avoiding monocultural farming (i.e. changing from rice crop to non-rice crop) in order to diversify their income sources. For instance, an attempt was made by the Long Phu’s Division of Agriculture and Rural Development in late 2017 to change the rice crop 3 to a corn crop. The government cooperated with a company to trial this model on the field of a household whose member holding a position in the village branch of the CPV. The company signed a contract with the farm household stating that they would buy 1 kilogram of fresh corn at the price of 4000 Vietnamese Dong. However, at the time of harvesting, the company changed this arrangement by reducing the price to 2–3000 Vietnamese Dong per kilogram of fresh corn because they asserted that the produce did not meet their standards. These standards, however, were not clearly explained in the contract with the farmer. From this failure, local farmers affirmed that a maize crop was not as effective as rice crop 3, so they decided to stick with the latter. This example resulted in much more than just the failure of a corn crop; it shows the ineffectiveness of the government’s top-down approach, which increased farmers’ distrust in the government’s attempts.

5 Discussion

In this study, we have shown that economic vulnerability alone, although important, could not explain farmers’ decision to refuse the state’s attempt at organising them in agricultural cooperatives. Our case study contributes to the call for extending the Critical Disaster Studies approach (Matthewman and Uekusa 2022) by going beyond “surface structure” and unveiling “deep structure” (Oliver-Smith 2022). Taking this approach, our findings revealed that farmers in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta were locked in a permanent position of vulnerability whereby their vulnerabilities are attributable to the complex interplay of economic, historical, cultural, political, and social processes. According to the practice-oriented risk habitus and multiple capital model (P-HAC) (Nguyen-Trung et al. 2023), these structural layers evolving throughout history are crucial in forming and shaping farmers’ access to natural, built, economic, political, social, and cultural capital and their decision-making in the present timeframe. By connecting farmers’ present decision and their collective memory, we have unveiled that imbalanced power relations, collective trauma, and government’s top-down authoritarian approaches have accumulated into farmers’ lack of interest in the state’s initiatives. Simply speaking, farmers feared that they would be controlled again by the state as they were in the collectivisation period (1976–1985). Instead of attributing entirely the failure of cooperatives to economic and management capability (e.g. Cox and Le 2014), our study demonstrates the complexity and depth of the issue relating to farmers’ vulnerability and the hindrances to reduce their vulnerability. Vulnerability is not constructed overnight; vulnerability has a history (Oliver-Smith 2022). This supports the claim made by Bankoff (2004: 3): “[v]ulnerability is not just concerned with the present or the future but is equally, and intimately, a product of the past”. Through our analysis, we demonstrate that Vietnamese farmers have understandable cultural reasons for refusing the state’s support, even though, from the outside perspective, their decision looks irrational. Our research aligns with the attempt to fault current research for the ignorance of social vulnerability rooted deeply within the social structures of the affected communities (Oliver-Smith 2013, 2022).

Farming risks—some are manageable and others are out of their control, as study participants perceived—are not evenly shared: Those who are crucial parts of global food supply chains but are at the bottom of the market hierarchy need to take greater risks for smaller returns as compared to the merchants and other stakeholders (even including overseas customers) who are at the middle and top of the production chain hierarchy. These farmers were “permanently” marginalised in the rice economy in the first place (see Warner et al. 2018 for a similar case of rice farmers in Costa Rica), and their vulnerability was simply and systemically exacerbated in times of disaster. For various reasons, these farmers were unable to, or preferred not to, collectively mobilise and fight for their livelihoods and lives. These farmers could not or did not want to develop their social capital (mutual help, shared knowledge, trust, collaboration, and collective safety nets) embedded in social relations among farmers who have common history, experience, and goals (Rivera et al. 2018) to negotiate their vulnerability and to reduce farming and disaster risks. Again, the studied Vietnamese farmers did not want to, or could not, work with others for reasons beyond their control; they are not illogical or uneducated. Cultivating a culture of risk avoiding/reducing farming practices was challenging due to the structural violence (Lee 2019), which encourages these farmers to stick to their traditional farming habits, which creates a vicious cycle of small-scale farmers’ vulnerability.

Building social capital to improve disaster preparedness and resilience in the current timeframe is inadequate in this regard. In our previous work (Nguyen-Trung et al. 2020), we showed a snapshot of how farmers relied mainly on their bonding (i.e. family, relative, and close friends) and bridging social capital (i.e. relationships with agricultural input suppliers) to facilitate their disaster recovery. In the current study, we illustrate how cultural trauma, rooted in the divisive and disruptive experiences of the agricultural collectivisation era, and intensified by the state's rigid command-and-control approach, significantly hampers the development of trust and strong bonding (farmer-farmer) and bridging social capital (farmer-government). These are critical for the effectiveness of agricultural cooperatives in disaster recovery. The farmers' hesitancy to join government-led cooperatives somewhat reflects current literature on the limited efficacy of cooperative membership in addressing farmers' vulnerability in other parts of Vietnam (Ho et al. 2022). As noted in the other studies, the key determinants of farmers' participation are ensuring cooperatives' voluntary membership, members' decision-making power, and their co-ownership of cooperatives (i.e. each member is a shareholder) (Van Phuong et al. 2020), trust and respect of democratic rights (Barraud-Didier et al. 2012; Hakelius and Hansson 2016), as well as consistent support from financial institutions, agricultural cooperatives, and governments at all levels (Cox and Le 2014; Berg et al. 2017). Our study highlights the need for addressing these historical and cultural issues as a prerequisite for building a constructive farmer-government relationship, essential for fostering cooperative success and resilience in line with the principles identified in previous research.

6 Conclusion

In this case study, we tell a story of how and why disaster-affected farmers in the coastal region of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta did not cooperate with their local governments in joining agricultural cooperatives in the aftermath of the 2015-2016 drought and saline intrusion. Using a Critical Disaster Studies approach, we examined farmers’ economic and socio-cultural vulnerability to explain this behaviour. Farmers were in a low position in the global rice supply chains, where they lacked power in negotiating with merchants and buyers in selling their agricultural produce. This vulnerable position left them in need of collaborating with each other to form a collective force that gave them more power and access to local and export rice markets. However, despite this need, farmers avoided linking social capital, refusing to work with others and to join the state-initiated agricultural cooperative because of their collective trauma caused by the state’s top-down approach and collectivisation policies in the past and their lack of trust in the government’s current policies. As such, our work emphasises the importance of analysing the socio-cultural root causes of the disasters facing farmers in particular and the general population.

In the face of climate crisis, improving the adaptive capacities of these crop producers in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta region and beyond and reducing their vulnerability to both farming and hazard risks are immediate agendas. Developing sustainable food supply chains to improve food security has been a major research focus, and international research typically suggests that technological interventions and development of farmer cooperatives/unions to increase farmers’ and entire food supply chains’ resilience and adaptive capacities is to prepare for tomorrow’s disasters (Berends 2021; Tran et al. 2022). However, there is a need to understand the lived experiences, actual needs, and well-being of farmers—the key player in the production hierarchy. Future research should extend beyond merely explaining the impact of disasters on farmers' livelihoods, to unveiling how they become entrenched in a position of permanent vulnerability. This position often leads to their exposure to greater risks and necessitates dealing with more severe disaster damages. Addressing the structural vulnerabilities of farmers and enhancing their resilience and adaptive capacities is crucial for supporting the entire food supply chains and ensuring global food security. Without healthy farmers, there are no healthy food supply chains. Recommending specific policies is beyond the scope of this paper, yet our study is an important reminder for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers that, as a first step, vulnerability needs to be properly viewed from more critical perspectives, especially by giving voices to the socially marginalised groups including small-scale farmers in Vietnam and beyond who are exposed to greater environmental and economic risks due to the complex social, cultural, and historical processes. For many who are systematically locked into a position of vulnerability, disaster is already happening even before an actual hazard event occurs.