“If We Don't Farm, We Don't Eat”: Subsistence, Monetisation, and the Limits of Development in Upland Vietnam

Abstract

This thesis is a qualitative case study of how farming households in Nam Dich, a remote upland commune in northern Vietnam, experience and navigate the tension between subsistence-based self-sufficiency and a growing need for monetary income. While Vietnam's transition from one of the world's poorest countries to a middle-income economy has brought substantial improvements in healthcare, education and infrastructure, the cash income required to participate in the life these improvements presuppose has not followed at the margins. Based on interviews with households, the study asks how this tension is experienced at the local level and which pathways to monetary income households themselves perceive as available, aspired to, or out of reach. The material is analysed thematically and read through a combined theoretical framework. Scoones ' sustainable livelihoods framework and Dorward et al. 's typology of hanging in, stepping up, and stepping out are used to read what households have access to and which strategies they pursue. Sen's capability approach and van der Ploeg's conception of peasant autonomy are used to question why a livelihood that sustains a household but does not generate cash is regarded as deficient. The findings show a livelihood in which non-monetary conditions and monetary capacity have come apart. Subsistence farming continues to feed the household but no longer covers what cash is required for, while the pathways through which cash could be obtained are constrained by a conversion problem operating along ethnic, geographic, and social lines. Wage labour, the preferred income source, functions as stepping out only for those already holding a margin. The study argues that the dominant models of development either require households to leave the way of life through which they sustain themselves, or to exhaust the resource base it depends on, and calls for a third path in which monetary participation and an intact capability set are compatible.