LAND FOR SOUTH VIET NAM'S PEASANTS

THE Viet Cong are known for their acts of terrorism, which often include the murder and kidnaping of innocent peasants. Still, they enjoy a simple, potent asset in the countryside of South Viet Nam. Whenever they conquer an area, the Communists promptly take the land away from the landowners and give it to the peasants. In many cases, the Viet Cong are able to keep the support of the peasants by warning that a return of government forces would mean a return of the landlords. Faced with U.S. troop withdrawals and possible early elections in which the vote of the hamlets may well be decisive, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu now has produced a land-reform program that attempts to beat the Communists at their own game.

The Thieu government last week introduced in the National Assembly a bill that would revolutionize land ownership in South Viet Nam, where the best acreage still is held by the rich and privileged few. According to the legislation, due to be enacted into law this month, South Viet Nam's 800,000 tenant farmers, at no cost to themselves, will be able to take full possession of the land they now till. The 40,000 landowners who hold more than 80% of South Viet Nam's cultivable riceland will, in effect, be bought out by the government for a total of $400 million in cash and bonds. The U.S. has promised to provide 10% of the amount. Says Thieu's new Minister of Agriculture, Cao Van Than, who is the architect of the reform program: "We are trying to take the initiative from the Communists."

Top Priority. There is, of course, the major question of whether Thieu's government can muster the political will and managerial skill to succeed in the task. Land reform has a long and unfortunate history in South Viet Nam. For years, U.S. and other foreign advisers impressed on a succession of Saigon rulers the need to end the inequitable system by which peasants are forced to turn over 25% to 50% of their harvests as rent to absentee landlords. If that advice had been heeded earlier, former U.S. Ambassador to India Chester Bowles recently mused, "it is unlikely that American troops would now be involved in that tragic country, fighting against peasant guerrillas." Bowles knows that the tragedy of Viet Nam cannot be explained quite so simply, but there is much truth in what he says. The gift of land is the surest way to win any peasant's loyalty.

In 1956, President Ngo Dinh Diem finally pushed through a law that granted tenant farmers the right to buy plots they were tilling. Because of the peasants' lack of money and the inefficiency of the Vietnamese bureaucracy, Diem's program failed. At the 1966 Honolulu summit, the South Vietnamese promised to make land reform a major part of the pacification program. Saigon did not make any real progress until three months ago, when Thieu put Than, a University of Pittsburgh-trained economist, in charge of the Agriculture Ministry and gave top domestic priority to land reform.

Four Acres. After raiding other Saigon ministries for topflight aides, Than quickly formulated a bold and broad proposal that would, in his words, "make a massive political and psychological impact on the population now." President Thieu and the Cabinet quickly gave their blessings to the bill, and it was also well received by a sizable majority of the representatives in the National Assembly. Even the Viet Cong may find it difficult to fault Than's bill, since parts of it are unabashedly based on the Communist model. His reform proposal recognizes Viet Cong land grants as legal and binding. He even used the Communist land-reform slogan as the motto for his program: "Land to the tiller!"

In an effort to prevent the reform from being bogged down by Saigon and provincial bureaucrats, Than has given considerable power to the elected councils in the country's 2,600 villages. One month after the bill becomes law, any tenant farmer of 18 or older may present his land claim to the village council in his area. After verifying his tenancy, the council will then grant an immediate freehold title to the land. Though a farmer may claim as many as 72 acres, Than believes that the average allotment will be about four acres. The only catch to retaining the title to the land is that the new owner must pledge to continue to farm it for at least two years.

Given the present political mood of urgency in Saigon, most of the landowners realize that it would be fruitless to oppose land reform. Landowners who have property in Viet Cong-controlled areas are delighted, since the bill will compensate them for holdings they had given up for lost. The price of the land will be pegged to the value of the plot's rice yield; an average acre of paddy now fetches $156. Payment will be 20% in cash and the rest in eight-year interest-bearing bonds. Even though the payments will stretch over nearly a decade, they are almost certain to strain Saigon's limited financial resources and to increase the inflationary pressures within the economy. So far, the peasants are skeptical about President Thieu's land reform.

Still, if he can prove that it will work, land reform might help him build the base in the countryside that until now has eluded every Saigon political leader. For the past six weeks, a countrywide Friday evening television broadcast has extolled the merits of the new program. Pamphlets and wall posters have been distributed in government-held areas, while The Free South, a special newspaper discussing land reform, has been air-dropped into Viet Cong-controlled regions. In Saigon, the IBM 360 computer in the U.S. aid agency has been programmed to print out large green deeds at the rate of 100 per minute as soon as the names of the new owners and the descriptions of their holdings are fed into it. Though the time is late, Thieu hopes to have as many of those deeds as possible in the hands of South Viet Nam's peasants before he faces a political showdown with the Communists.

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