Vietnam
Vietnamese with English Subtitles
A documentary featuring the story of a young female migrating worker and her left-behind family and villagers who are struggling with indebtedness and water conflicts that 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 aims to shed light on how local farmers struggle with indebtedness, water conflicts, and labor shortages after entering contractual arrangements with agribusiness firms under cooperative models. The film also looks at the reasons why young adults who grow up in this reason feel they have to migrate to urban areas to make a living, leaving their children and the elderly behind. Under the changing climatic conditions and water-related conflicts, farming can no longer provide a decent livelihood for many rural people, particularly young people, who have limited access to land and production resources. Those young people have no other option than to leave their villages to make a living in urban areas. That makes the outmigration from the Mekong Delta become serious in recent years as 1,3 million people, the majority of which are young adults, have left the delta for jobs in urban areas. In addition, the agriculture restructuring has created conflicts over the water use between different types of crops, as well as challenged the collective management of production resources under contract farming schemes. The increasing pressure from erratic climate conditions, saltwater intrusion from the coastal areas, and hydroelectric dams upstream of the Mekong River have made the livelihoods of people in the Mekong Delta increasingly difficult.