Generally speaking, agriculture has been given first priority during the transition period. The policy reforms implemented by the government have enabled Vietnam to meet its food demand and to export its rice surplus. The rice-related policies are presented briefly in Table 5.

Before the 1986 renovation. During the late 1970s, Vietnam experienced a serious food shortage and had to import 5.6 million tons of food from 1976 to1980 (Thoa, 1996). Rice production in 1980 was even lower than that in 1976 (Table 6).
In this period, cooperatives dominated agricultural production, with the establishment and merging of the High Grade Agricultural Cooperatives. In December
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1976, the Fourth National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam mapped out the transitional period to socialism as follows: “To carry out socialist industrialization and transform the economy from small-scale production into large-scale socialist production, priority is given to rationally develop heavy industry based on the development of agriculture and light industry” (Luoc, 1996). However, at this time, the collective agrarian model revealed its weaknesses as it discouraged collective labor to work. The results were low income and low growth of agriculture (1.9%). Recognizing the situation, the first formal step toward renovation was taken in 1979, when the Sixth Party Plenum emphasized on ‘some urgent problems in the improvement of economic management.” The objective was to encourage all cooperatives to fully utilize the available resources to boost agricultural output and help overcome economic difficulties and food shortages. However, under a bureaucratic central management, the egalitarian distribution of income in the cooperatives produced a strong disincentive to farmers. Peasants concentrated on the cultivation of their small private kitchen gardens (which was 5% of the cultivated