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Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2013 10:46:50 +0900

Health Risks in
Transitional Agricultures

Cases: Central Vietnam and
Southern Laos

The significance of this
inquiry lies in the fact that the greatest majority of developing countries’
population reside in rural areas. They are engaged mostly in farming and
producing other products consumed within their own communities. In Vietnam (and
Lao PDR), the rural population accounts for 73% (and 71%) of the entire
population, even though they contribute only a little over 20% (and 35%) of
GDP.[i]
To understand what the majority of the population does and how they decide what
they do, therefore, is to understand what to expect from the largest group of
potential “beneficiaries” of the nation-wide attempt at improving economic and
other life.[ii]

There is
also a need to capture the basis of the behavior of this largest group. In 2006,
the World Bank reported that costs of chemicals-induced health and other damages
in Vietnam surpassed one billion US dollars a year accounting for nearly 2% of
Vietnam’s GD (2006), 57 billion US dollars.[iii]The
total is estimated from medical costs and losses from the forgone markets of the
contaminated agricultural products.

In the mean time, a micro level observation of rural
life often turns up seemingly contradictory behaviors. Several years ago, one of
my informants in a rural Vietnam told me that he was not interested in having
another child. He already had two children including one suffering from a severe
cerebral palsy, induced by dioxin contamination of the drinking water. One year
ago, the same farmer showed me his youngest and third, a daughter, sitting next
to the handicapped child. To have more than a couple of children is a burden
heavy enough for his poor household. To risk having another handicapped child
seemed to me the sign that the father had forgone all the necessary calculations
for a sustainable life. But a thought struck me that he may have merely followed
the dictate of more conventional rules of behavior – seeking to fulfill one or
more of the three utilities of having children – labor, future insurance and
affection.[iv]
Still　his decision was definitely out of
the ordinary under the pressure of commercializing agriculture and of the
increasing cautions against the use of pesticides and other agrochemicals.

Conditions under which the farmers are confronted by the
decisions that help improve their life are, needless to say, complex. However,
one point of note among many of my informants is the fact that production, and
thus the efficient mode of production, does not dominate their concerns. A hint
for this puzzle may be offered by Clifford Geertz’s Bali farmers in Indonesia.[v]They
allow the farmland absorb the increasing population even at the cost of
agricultural per capita productivity. The gain, however, is the security of
employment for all, an invaluable gain for the community.

In a similar way, there is an act of balancing more than
one concern among the Vietnamese farmers. They are concerned not only with
agricultural production but also with others tasks which collectively constitute
their secure life, such as having children, making the meaningful use of the
idle time between the harvest seasons, observation of communal customs, or
raising pigs and other livestock as the contingency package in case of emergency
such as draught and other unpredictable disruptions of life. To a Vietnamese,
these activities are the sign of farmers dispersing their attention among many
targets, counterproductive practices which make the farmers resistant to changes
and turn rural economy “stagnant.”[vi]

But an entirely different interpretation is possible
that the Vietnamese farmers integrate economic and productive activities into
the overall system of life as a part, instead of turning their whole life into a
part of economic and productive activities. Given this reversal of the usual
view of the farmers as espoused by development economists and planners, it is
much easier to see that the farmers’ behavior is shaped by the need to maintain
equilibrium among many concerns which collectively support their life. The
decision for action may be reached after the careful examination of if and how a choice of action makes a
difference in the whole of life with which they are familiar against the
resources at their disposal.

This leads to an important question: how could a farmer
maintain consistency in the choices of action, or make a choice which is
consistently rational across many concerns of their life?  It is here that the limited information,
or the evidence, concerning the consequence of a chosen action plays the
critical role.

The question calls attention to
some of the conditions of farmers’ life influencing their cognitive ability.
First, there is the absence of “evidence” which may influence the farmers’
choice. The case of medical experts’ warning against the misuse or abuse of
chemicals or against reproduction may offer a good example. From a few cases of
chemicals-induced ailments like birth defects among those who have been exposed
directly or indirectly to Agent Orange, the medical experts may see a
distinctive pattern, the likelihood of recurrence among the farmers in the same
living environment or with similar background. However, this
“scientifically-proven” evidence is in conflict with another “empirical”
evidence: many others including themselves have been spared of the same
misfortune. This evidence is supported by the largest cases in the community.

Sometimes the
“scientifically-proven” evidence is hardly evidence since the farmers have no
means of evaluating it. Medical and chemicals experts may warn that the
chemicals-induced ailments may later result in debilitating ailments such as
cancers or neurological irregularities; the farmers have no basis for discerning
the potentials for these serious ailments among the “common health problems”
such as headache or skin irritation which “chemicals poisonings
can mimic”[vii]at
their early stages.

This
lack of “empirical evidence” can be spotted in other areas of choices. In
Vietnam as in Lao PDR, the informants often speak of investment of their surplus
asset in the children’s education. The evidence behind what appears to be a sure
sign of the farmers’ taking a rational course action to improve the life of
their children, however, is not about the possible outcome of the action, but
about the consequences of foregoing the action. The most frequent replies to my
inquiry is: “I don’t want my children to have such a difficult life like mine,
like any farmer’s.”

Nation-wide efforts
since 1986 to transform their planned to market-oriented economies have
multiplied Vietnamese and Lao farmers’ reliance on their own “empirical”
evidence over the evidence devised by somebody else. The efforts have filled
their living environment with more causes of uncertainty, and thus any action
would inevitably present risks. In both countries, restrictions on domestic
trade of agricultural products have been lifted, the farmers are now allowed to
own, concede, and even inherit the right to cultivate farm land for the duration
nearing the length of one generation virtually instituting the private ownership
of land, and the access to technology and other agricultural input has been
opened up for their foreign manufacturers.

All
of these may have helped improve the overall environment for the farmers’ action
to take advantage of the market opportunities for their product. But one thing
is missing: the emerging world of market economy is an uncharted terrain where
there is little evidence that shifting their attention to a more
narrowly-defined concern with higher productivity can produce the expected
consequences. Within the purview of their life, there is more counter-evidence:
occasional visits to Ho Chi Minh City or to Hanoi for a Phu Cat farmer are the
occasions to witness what have become of the surplus labor that the improved
agricultural sector in rural Vietnam has produced--the rise of an “informal
sector.”

The farmers who appear
to turn their deaf ears to the advancing market economy and refuse to tailor
their action accordingly do so not because they are ignorant or resisting
changes but because of the very efforts to act rationally within the conditions
that greatly influence their cognitive ability. With this limitation,
inconsistent behavior results from an unintended compromise among the efforts to
deal with multiple concerns: less than full satisfaction with one in return for
less than complete sacrifice on another.

[i]
World Bank
Data
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator
for the appropriate countries.

[ii] The background of this
essay are the rapid changes that two former planned economies of Lao PDR and
Vietnam are experiencing since mid-1980s. For a succinct discussion of these
changes please see, Pradumna B. Rana and Naved Hamid (1996).

[iii]
“Vietnam
Food Safety and Agricultural Health Action Plan,” Document of World Bank, 2006, Report no.
35231 VN, p.xii.

[iv]
Liebenstein,
(1974).

[v] Clifford Geertz,
(1970).

[vi] Nguyen Khac Tung,
(1993, p.374).

[vii] Fn 9,
p.6