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After my recent posting of the short note about the IR8 — the rice variety that has made giant agricultural revolution around the world, and legends in Vietnam — friends asked me to provide further info on the person who was among the first hands to bring “miracle rice IR8" to Vietnam.
The complete story is long, and has been told in his book ”A DRAGON LIVES FOREVER”. Following is the article printed in the IRRI’s newsletter Rice Today.
For your reference, Vi Thanh is 60km SW of Can Tho, locates at SE corner of Lot # 6028-1 in this old military map. If you are familiar with the Mekong Delta, you can use this satellite image
Today is part 1 of Dr. Hargrove’s story.
WAR and RICE
The Green Revolution in rice has been documented throughout much of Asia, but few think of Vietnam in the 1960s and ‘70s as a “Green Revolution country.” That’s because IR8 arrived at the height of a brutal war that overshadowed an agricultural transformation in the countryside. Rice means life itself in Vietnam, and was used both as a weapon and as a tool for peace. I have strong memories of the war: Huey choppers, mortars, ambushes, and needless deaths. But I also remember Honda Rice.
Tom Hargrove, August 2006
4 June 1988, in Hau Giang Province, Vietnam (Chuong Thien Province during the war)
I’m stunned. I struggle for the right words, then simply ask, “Why didn’t you kill me, Tu Rang?”
“Because you brought the new rice seeds, and our farmers needed them.”
“But did you know I was a U.S. Army officer?”
“Of course. Your civilian clothes didn’t fool anyone.”
The former Viet Cong—literally, Vietnam Communist, the common name for the National Liberation Front—and I look into each other’s faces, something we never did in 1969-70. He’s smiling, but he’s hard—it shows. He’s also telling the truth. I can sense it.
“I was less than a kilometer away whenever you traveled this canal in 1969,” Tran Van Rang says. Today, Tu Rang is vice-chairman of the Vi Thanh People’s Committee. But, two decades ago, he was the local Viet Cong political officer. I know that political officers held ultimate power in the Communist infrastructure—they gave orders to military commanders.
“You were entering my territory when you came here,” Tu Rang continues. “The local farmers all supported the Revolutionary Forces, and reported on you.
“But I didn’t have you killed because of the new rice seeds.”
This trip is getting heavy, I think, as our sampan cuts north through the muddy waters of the Xa No Canal.
New rice seeds. To me, they’re one of the world’s most powerful tools for peace. That’s why I made the Green Revolution my profession.
But I learned about those seeds—especially IR8 or Honda Rice—here, in the midst of carnage. Had there been no war, rice wouldn’t have become such a part of my life. Now I must face a new reality: those rice seeds probably saved my life. The lower Mekong Delta is peaceful and beautiful now. But I remember it as ugly, dangerous, and one of the most tragic places on Earth. To me, this is still 1969-70. We’ve just passed Duc Long. I remember friends being killed in an ambush north of this village… in a sampan that I was supposed to have taken. Tu Rang must have ordered that ambush. I know I’m safe now, but I’ve never traveled this canal without an M-16 and bandolier of ammunition.
“Has any other American been here since the war?” I ask Dr. Vo-Tong Xuan, my host and vice-president of the University of Can Tho. Xuan, who is now the rector of Angiang University, in the Mekong Delta, had worked as a research fellow at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), where I’d worked since 1973.
“No, you’re the first foreigner—of any nationality—to be in the lower Ca Mau Peninsula since the war ended in 1975.”
I can do it only because I work with rice.
2006: looking back
Vietnam veterans and historians have recently queried me about the origin and history of the term Honda Rice in the war. Interesting, considering that the war ended 31 years ago. Or did it? Wars never really go away, for those who lived them.
War and rice. Anyone who wants to understand the war should know the role that rice played. I learned about rice as a young U.S. Army officer deep in Vietnam’s heavily contested Mekong Delta at the height of the war, in 1969-70.
IRRI released the semidwarf IR8 to farmers in late 1966. Within a couple of years, it was the most widely grown rice variety ever known. IR8 launched the Green Revolution in Asian rice.
The Western press called IR8 the miracle rice. Its official name in Vietnam was Lúa Thần Nông, or “Rice of the Farming God.”
But Vietnamese farmers quickly dubbed IR8 Lúa Honda—or Honda Rice—because one good crop bought a new motorbike.
How did I get into rice in Vietnam? I was raised on a West Texas cotton farm. I received my B.S., a double degree in agricultural science and journalism—along with an Army officer commission—from Texas A&M University in 1966. I then finished an M.S. at Iowa State University and, in 1968, reported to Infantry Officers School at Ft. Benning, Georgia.
I arrived in Vietnam in June 1969 as a first lieutenant. The legendary John Paul Vann (made famous by the book and movie A Bright Shining Lie) ran the war in the Mekong Delta. Vann reviewed my records, saw my farm and educational background, and assigned me, as an adviser to the Vietnamese military and government, to Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MAC-V) Team 73 in Vi Thanh in Chuong Thien Province, in Vietnam’s southern Ca Mau Peninsula. Seventy percent of Chuong Thien’s population was rice farmers.
Chuong Thien was an awful place for a dryland cotton farmer. The average elevation was less than 1 meter, and 97% of its land was covered by water—rice fields or swamp—during the 6-month monsoon season.
Chuong Thien was also a Viet Cong (VC) stronghold. The U.S. military constantly classified it as one of the two least secure South Vietnamese provinces. Putting it another way, Chuong Thien was one of the VC’s two most secure provinces.
A dozen U.S. advisers were killed in Chuong Thien during my 1-year tour. Five were killed in sampans. These boats were our only transport, unless we could hitch a ride on helicopters, along the rivers and canals during 6 or 7 months of monsoon rain. No one survived a sampan ambush.
Our casualties may not seem high, but only 160 Americans were stationed in Chuong Thien, and only 30 or 40 advisers worked outside the small provincial HQ in Vi Thanh.
Chuong Thien was also the only Delta province with no civilian agricultural adviser, assigned by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The word was, none would go there. But no one asked if I wanted to go to Chuong Thien—the Army sent me.
U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, or LBJ, had visited IRRI in October 1966, accompanied by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. LBJ appreciated farmers, and went into the IRRI experiment fields to see IR8 (see main photo, pages 34-35). LBJ made a historic flight later that day, to Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, “to visit our boys over there.” Johnson later pressured USAID to promote the hardy IR8 in Vietnam.
IR8 had arrived in Chuong Thien Province in 1968—a year before me. The first IR8 seeds were smuggled into Vietnam in 1967 by my colleague Jose Ona, a Filipino agronomist who had done his M.S. research at IRRI, then was hired as USAID rice agronomist for the Mekong Delta. A friend at IRRI had harvested the IR8 seeds from IRRI experimental plots, and given them to Ona.
Ona then set up IR8 demonstration plots in each province of the Mekong Delta. I feel safe in saying that no farm technology—anywhere—ever spread faster than IR8 seeds in the Delta, even at the height of the fighting.
A farmer named Ong Ba Lien planted the first Honda Rice seeds in Chuong Thien Province in late 1967. He was the best farmer in the region, and Ona and I later tested and demonstrated IR8 and IR5, another IRRI variety, on his farm. I felt not only welcome but, rarer in those days, safe on Ba Lien’s farm, even though the area ranged from dangerous to suicidal for Americans.
When I arrived in 1969, farmers were already growing IR8 on almost 1,000 hectares across the province.
I was soon bringing IR8 seeds to farmers, who suffered as much as any people I’ve ever known, across Chuong Thien, a province that the war had torn brutally. We traveled mostly by sampan on brown-water canals and rivers with Vietnamese agricultural cadres and soldiers.
But sometimes by Huey helicopters. I could spot IR8 easily from choppers, because it reminded me of a “crew cut.” IR8’s short, stiff stems held it erect, while the tall traditional varieties fell over and lay flat. Thus, IR8 could convert nutrients to heavy heads of grain, and hold them upright.
That genetic trait made IR8 outyield any rice that tropical Asia had ever known. Farmers started harvesting 5 or 6 tons per hectare from fields where yields had stagnated at 1 or 1.5 tons for centuries. Traditional rice varieties took 160 to 200 days to mature, so farmers could grow only one crop per year using the monsoon rain. IR8 matured in about 130 days, so farmers could grow two crops per year. The new rice was also nonsensitive to daylength, so farmers anywhere could grow it, at any time of the year.
By mid-1970, IR8 was planted on about half of Chuong Thien’s rice land, land that was scarred by bomb and artillery craters.
That’s what made it tough to come to a personal peace with Vietnam. In my other role, as an Army officer, I called a lot of the bombs and artillery that left those scars, and sometimes killed or maimed farmers who were grateful for the IRRI seeds. War and peace. Working with both was hard.
The new rice seeds were the only good thing—other than wonderful Mekong Delta farm families—that I saw in the war.
To me, new seeds offer hope. Maybe that’s why I made rice improvement—then later, overall international agricultural development—my profession after Vietnam.
But I learned about those seeds in a setting of death. What did the Viet Cong think about IR8? In the first couple of years, the VC opposed IR8, calling it a plot of the “imperialistic Americans.” But, in 1970, the VC changed its position and issued a new directive. VC cadres were now to learn IR8 culture, and take the new seeds to contested or “liberated” (meaning VC-controlled) zones.
(to be continued)
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Yuanclarkson, ChristineLe, nicol_g, PSYOPS, Sue77584 has marked this note useful
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