Vietnam’s Global Market Integration During the Covidian Era: An Exploratory Analysis of the Pandemic’s Marginalising Effects on the Rural Poor

Abstract

Extreme poverty has worsened since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This global crisis—the scale of individual and collective effects of which many are still difficult to estimate—has triggered considerable disruptions to supply chains, fueling existing concerns about food insecurity and worsening social inequalities, particularly in countries in the midst of global market integration, such as Vietnam. Despite medium-high economic ‘growth’, a widening of social inequalities between rural and urban areas is noticeable in Vietnam. Vietnamese peasants cope with the rapid socio-geographic transformations associated with the increasingly productivist and commercially orientated global agricultural sector. Indeed, the decision-making power to participate in the global economic system can be extremely challenging for groups with already high levels of marginality, such as peasants. It is therefore crucial to assess how they evolve their decision-making power with regards to their participation in the global market, especially in times of crisis: do they gain or lose power? Given the significance of the changes expected in the agri-food and manufacturing sectors, better understanding of how peasants cope with such changes appears critical. This discussion presents, in the context of COVID-19, an analysis of peasant adaptation strategies to global market integration in Vietnam.