Post 10 — Same Farmers. Same Land. Two Years Apart.
In 1988 Vietnam appealed for emergency food aid. In 1989 it exported 1.4 million tonnes of rice and stood third in the world. Resolution 10 had given farm households fifteen-year land contracts and let them keep and sell everything above a threshold.
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The farmers didn’t change. The land didn’t change. The reward did. Behavior follows rewards — and it always has.
Vietnam went from emergency food aid appeal to the world’s third-largest rice exporter in twelve months. The reward structure changed. Nothing else did.
The Two-Year Inversion
In 1988, Vietnam asked the world for emergency food aid — 108,000 tons of it. Its northern provinces were eating seed stocks. Officials admitted three million people were on the brink of starvation.
In 1989, Vietnam exported 1.4 million metric tonnes of rice — and became the world’s third-largest rice exporter, trailing only Thailand and the United States.
Same country. Same farmers. Same land. Twelve months apart.
What changed? Not the people. Not the soil. One thing changed: the reward structure.
The Old Architecture
Under collective farming — the system that governed northern Vietnam for three decades — farmers worked land managed by state cooperatives. Compensation came in work points — distributed regardless of individual output. The state purchased rice at fixed prices well below market rates. There was no connection between how much a farmer produced and what she earned.
Meeting the collective quota was the floor and the ceiling. Exceeding it produced nothing. The rational response was to produce enough to meet the threshold — and no more.
By 1988, that rational response had accumulated into a national crisis. Northern provinces were eating seed stocks. Vietnam went to foreign donors for emergency food. That year it shipped barely 91,000 tonnes of rice abroad — and imported more than twice that much.
This was not agricultural incompetence. The Mekong Delta is one of the world’s great rice-growing regions. Vietnamese farmers were not failing to farm. They were responding, rationally, to a reward structure that gave them no reason to produce more.
Resolution 10
On April 5, 1988, the Politburo of the Vietnamese Communist Party issued Resolution 10. The core change was simple: farm households received 15-year land use contracts. Output above a set threshold belonged to the farmer — to be sold at market prices.
For the first time, effort connected directly to income.
“I can always eat what I don’t sell.” —Ngo Thi Mui, rice farmer, near Hanoi
Rice grows in cycles of three to four months. In the Mekong Delta, farmers harvest twice a year, sometimes three times. Resolution 10 arrived before the main planting season. Within months, farmers had planted and harvested a full crop under the new rules. Better irrigation mattered too: in Cuu Long, a Delta province that harvested a record million tonnes in 1989, the province’s agriculture chief credited new canals for bringing idle land back into use and adding a second annual crop — while calling Hanoi’s reforms “like a key that opened the door to greater production.”
In 1989 — twelve months after the reform — Vietnam exported 1.4 million metric tonnes of rice. Third on the planet. By 1999, Vietnam was exporting 4.5 million tonnes annually: the world’s second-largest rice exporter, behind only Thailand.
Total rice production — the combined harvest, not yet traded — rose from 16.0 million tonnes in 1986 to 19.2 million tonnes in 1990, a 20 percent increase in four years.
Stop here for a second — this is the part worth sitting with. Vietnamese farmers were already rational under collective farming; they simply had nothing to gain by producing more. Give the same hands, on the same land, a reason to produce more, and one growing season later, they did. Nothing about the people changed. Only what they were rewarded for did.
Behavior Is Architecture, Not Character
Two decades later, Thailand tried to support its own rice farmers with the opposite design: a government-guaranteed purchase price roughly 50 percent above market for ordinary paddy, regardless of quality or demand. The reward was disconnected from sustainable outcome. Over two and a half years the government took in 54.4 million tonnes of unmilled rice at a cost of up to 985 billion baht — grain that piled up in state warehouses, much of it degrading past the point of sale.
Same crop. Same region. Opposite architectures. Opposite outcomes.
Vietnamese farmers were not lazy. They were rational. They responded to exactly the reward in front of them. When collective farming offered no marginal return for marginal effort, they offered marginal effort. When Resolution 10 connected effort to income, they produced a rice surplus in a single growing season — and became one of the world’s dominant exporters within a decade.
This is what BFR shows, again and again: the behavior we see is almost never a character problem. It is a design problem. Change the reward. Change the behavior. Immediately.
Behavior Follows Rewards. The pattern shows up wherever people are measured and rewarded.
Ask yourself: Where in your organization does effort connect directly to outcome — and where is that connection missing? What is your Resolution 10 waiting to happen?
If you are working through an incentive design challenge in your organization — trying to understand why a policy, initiative, or team isn’t doing what you designed it to do — that is the work. Advisory Services →
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—Wayne
Going Deeper
If you were a Vietnamese farmer in 1988 — working land managed by a state cooperative, where producing above the quota earned you nothing — would you have worked harder? And when the right to sell what you grew above quota became yours in 1989, did anything need to change except that?
Last time: Britain offered Afghan farmers a payment to destroy their poppy fields. The reward created a reason to grow more.
Next: The NBA built a draft lottery to help its weakest teams. It created a reward for losing.
In development — a professional golf tour built to pay players more than they had ever been offered; a UK welfare reform that moved the cost of illness off the government and onto the ill; a university grading system where student evaluations, not academic rigor, determined a professor’s standing. More on the way.
Sources
Richburg, Keith B. “Near Famine in ’88, Vietnam Now Exports Rice.” The Washington Post, April 18, 1990.
“80 Years On: Vietnam Emerges From Rice Importer to Top 3 Global Exporter.” Voice of Vietnam (VOV), August 28, 2025.
Poapongsakorn, Nipon, et al. “Corruption in the Paddy Pledging Policy.” Thailand Development Research Institute, August 26, 2014.
International Monetary Fund. Thailand: 2013 Article IV Consultation—Staff Report. IMF Country Report No. 13/323. Washington, D.C.: IMF, November 2013.
Lamb, David. “Rice Exports Leave Vietnam’s Farmers Knee-Deep in Profits.” Los Angeles Times, March 26, 1999.
Wedel, Paul. “Shortage Threatens Famine in Vietnam.” United Press International, June 5, 1988.
FAO. FAOSTAT, Crops and Livestock Products (production) and Crops and Livestock Trade (trade) domains, Viet Nam, rice, 1980–2000.
USDA Foreign Agricultural Service. “Rice Market and Policy Changes over the Past Decade.” GAIN Report, Bangkok, January 18, 2017.
Communist Party of Vietnam, Politburo. Nghị quyết số 10-NQ/TW, ngày 05/4/1988 của Bộ Chính trị về đổi mới quản lý kinh tế nông nghiệp (Resolution 10 on renovation of economic management in agriculture).
BFR is written to be accessible, welcomed, and celebrated by every reader — not simplified, not elevated. Just clear.
