Researchers have examined the impact of farmers’ migration in two disaster-prone regions of Viet Nam: one with high absolute poverty rates; the other poor in terms of unemployment rates.
 

‘When we asked the farmers in our study in Viet Nam,’ said Elisabeth Simelton, lead author of a study on rural migration and a senior scientist with World Agroforestry (ICRAF) Viet Nam, ‘poverty and the hardship of being a farmer were among the most common reasons for seeking non-farm jobs. On a farm, each family member can be converted to labour capacity or “strength of arms”. Migration from farms often starts not with the entire family but as a household risk assessment of whose “arm strength” to sacrifice and whose can generate the best economic returns.’

Despite family planning, which theoretically reduces limits on working outside the home, rural Vietnamese women remain largely responsible for housework, the fields nearby the homestead and tasks such as weeding and planting. Men, arguably having the ‘stronger arms’, tend to manage forestry and more distant fields. And when members of farm households leave to find jobs in the cities, men tend to go first, leaving the elderly, mothers, sisters and wives behind. Skewed gender demographics can signal gendered vulnerability risks, as opportunities for women and men to maximize their contributions in agriculture are often unequal.

‘The statistics and the research somehow tell part of my own story, too,’ said Simelton. ‘My father emigrated from Palestine to Sweden in the 1960s, similar to many southern Europeans. My mother and uncle both migrated from a farm to the city. My mother returned and, as a 15-year-old, I, too, left the farm. Coincidentally, I now work in the biggest migrant region in Viet Nam: home to the majority of the 39 young women and men aged 15 to 33 who suffocated in a truck on the way to the UK in 2019. The realities that migrant workers of today leave behind only rarely make it to the headlines in Western media and result in little reaction, despite the 6500 workers (mostly from South Asia) who lost their lives as construction workers for the World Cup infrastructure in Qatar.’

The study tells two stories, of the low-risk and the high-risk strategies. The low-risk migration strategy is to take seasonal jobs (less upfront investment required) and return to the farm during peak periods. For example, in Dien Bien Province a father and/or son take construction jobs in Ha Noi, the capital city. Some married women from ethnic minority groups around 25–35 years-old will camp with their husbands near construction sites. The women at home temporarily take control of farm and household jobs. Incomes contribute to emergency expenses, improving housing, and buying livestock.
 

The high-risk strategy involves taking loans and sending children abroad. For example, in Ha Tinh Province, many years of parents’ migration are required to pay the cost of later sending adult children abroad: around USD 10,000–30,000. In this strategy, neighbours and relatives play a much bigger role as unpaid farm labour. Remittances can contribute to adaptation in agriculture through covering the income gap when growing perennials and also help to speed economic recovery after a disaster.

‘Our study showed that youth will go abroad — the unmarried young people of both genders and married men typically below 40 — because that matches the requirements in advertisements for job contracts, which require upfront investment in the form of loans,’ said Duong Ming Tuan, second author of the study and a research assistant with ICRAF Viet Nam.

Factors pushing and pulling rural migration in Viet Nam relate to poverty in some way. They include slow agricultural development, lack of rural credit, environmental stress, poverty and emergencies, such as an urgent need to pay medical bills or recover from natural disasters.

‘At the individual level,’ said Ella Houzer, third author of the study and researcher with ICRAF Viet Nam, ‘there are desires to exit agriculture, escape poverty, make farm investments that can reduce risks, or simply to cope.’

The research team conclude that remittances do work as insurance and investment in resilient agriculture, such as including more trees, while at the same time increasing labour vulnerability, especially for disaster preparation and disaster responses because labour is reduced.

Agricultural extension agencies need to offer training not only to male heads of households but also to others, particularly women, who might be recruited as exchange labour during male migration. The study also highlights a need for more research on agroforestry systems with low labour input requirements.

Read the journal article

Simelton E, Duong TM, Houzer E. 2021. When the ‘strong arms’ leave the farms: migration, gender roles and risk reduction in Vietnam. Sustainability 13(7):4081.

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