Looking for food : the difficult journey of the Hmong in Vietnam : (anthropological perspectives on food security)

23 p.Finding food was the difficult journey for the Hmong in the past, and it remains so at present. Projective reports indicate that it will be difficult in the future also. Having lived in the northern highlands for several centuries, the Hmong’s primary food production activities are shifting cultivation, livestock breeding, and terrace field farming. Recently their forests have been seriously destroyed and under the provisions of the 1993 Land Law, their cultivable land has been limited. Moreover, their isolated communities, their low level of education, and their lack of information denied them access to scientific and technological advances and the market economy. These are the main reasons for the Hmong’s current state of poverty as well as low and unsustainable food security. To achieve food security in the future, they have to solve the following contradictions: land limitation verses increasing population, food production verses conserving forest and water resources; the need for production development verses low level of education, and the changing forms of livelihood verses traditional custom

Distilling culture into commodity? The emergent homemade alcohol trade and gendered livelihoods in Upland Northern Vietnam

Ethnic minorities in the uplands of northern Vietnam are experiencing rapid state- and market-induced economic and agrarian transformations. These communities are having to make important livelihood adaptations to adjust, while living at Vietnam’s economic and political margins. We analyse one such market-induced transformation that some upland communities are deciding to engage with, connected to an increasing demand for locally distilled alcohol. Against the backdrop of traditional production for domestic consumption, distilled alcoholic beverages are now (re)emerging as a cash-earning opportunity. Drawing on interviews and observations with ethnic minority Hmong and Yao women and men in Lào Cai Province, we analyse the degree to which household members have engaged with this market opportunity and the often complex reasons behind their choices. We reveal how an apparently simple shift in scale of a customary activity generates nuanced cultural, gendered and generational debates that, at times, are at odds with mere profitability