Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
North Vietnam emerged from its war with France in 1954 a food-deficit area. Densely populated, war-torn, it found it self more than customarily dependent upon outside supplies of rice and supplemental foods, which it had usually imported from South Vietnam. Soviet stop-gap aid filled the food deficit until DRV production was improved. The negative attitude of the GVN toward any economic relations with the DRV beyond those necessitated by the Geneva regroupment, in which Diem became progressively more adamant, created one pressure upon the DRV to seek dependable sources of further aid abroad. A second stemmed from lack of human and material capital to take advantage of its natural resources: the North contained all the developed mineral lodes and most of the established manufacturing in the two Vietnams, as well as the bulk of electric power capacity in Indochina. 50/ The DRV needed substantial foreign aid either to press toward modernizing its basic industry or to collectivize its farms.
a. Agriculture
Foreign aid to the DRV in agriculture, aside from relief shipments of food, took the form chiefly of technical assistance, both in management and technique. 51/ Chinese experts in Maoist land reforms figured prominently in the-Concept and direction of the collectivization drives. Russian advisors are believed to have advocated DRV concentration on mineral and tropical products valuable in communist international trade, and to have furnished methodological assistance in irrigation, fertilizing, and the like, but to little avail: labor intensive, hand tool farming in the traditional fashion persisted. Progress towards collectivization was perceptible. After retrenching in 1957 following the peasant flare-up, the regime moved ahead, although more cautiously. At the beginning of 1958, less than 5% of the farm population was in producer cooperatives; enrollments increased thereafter, and sharply in 1960, from about 55% of peasant households in July to about 85% in December. About one third of the collectives were in advanced stages of communal land mmership and shared production; the remainder represented inchoate socialization, with market incentive still a mainstay. Performance in agriculture was generally poor, output never rising above subsistence levels, and slower and erratic growth depressing progress in other sectors of the economy. There was, however, perceptible progress:
Food Grain Per Capita 52/ ( in Kilograms) 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 260 310 283 315 358 304 337 339
The DRV gross national product, owing to improvements in both the industrial and agricultural sectors, grew steadily some 6%per year after 1958. The most promising years for the DRV were 1958 and 1959, when performance in both sectors was extraordinarily good; thereafter, consecutive years of poor harvests and rapid population increases cut into gains.
