Leaving the Rice Field
A documentary featuring the story of a young female migrant worker and her left-behind family and villagers who are struggling with indebtedness and water conflicts are caused by agricultural restructuring and unequal power relations in cooperatives-centered contract farming schemes in the Mekong Delta. Although the setting of these stories is within one district, the characters’ situations in the film are not unfamiliar to other localities of the Mekong Delta and other regions facing similar agrarian changes and outmigration.
Leaving the Rice Field is an exploration of how local farmers struggle with indebtedness, water conflicts, and labor shortages after entering contractual arrangements with agribusiness firms under supposedly cooperative models. The film also looks at the reasons why young adults who grow up in this region feel they have to migrate to urban areas to make a living, leaving their children and the elderly behind. Over 1.3 million people, the majority of which are young adults, have left the delta for jobs in urban areas. In addition, agriculture restructuring has created conflicts over the water use between different types of crops, and challenges traditional practices of collective management of production resources under new contract farming schemes. This along with changing climate conditions, saltwater intrusion from the coastal areas, and hydroelectric dams upstream of the Mekong River have made the outlook for these communities increasingly precarious.