Vietnamese police have arrested seven residents in the Central Highlands for preventing men from cutting down a farmer’s coffee and durian trees as part of a contract dispute, residents told RFA. The incident is one of the latest disputes over land use rights in the country, which have been ongoing since the late 1990s.
Five men were sent to cut down the trees because farmer Nguyen Thanh Giang had not delivered the contracted amount of coffee beans to Thang Loi Coffee Joint Stock Co, the company from which he had leased the land.
After hearing the men cutting down the trees in the darkness early on Monday, neighbours helped Giang chase them away. They caught three of the men and detained them near Hoa Dong commune in Krong Dak district, Dak Lak province, a local resident told RFA.
When the town’s authorities learned of the incident, they dispatched 20 vans with up to 500 police officers to the scene to rescue the three men and arrest 25 people. After the interrogation, the police released 18 people and arrested the remaining seven, charging them with “resisting enforcement authorities” and “illegally holding people,” state media reported.
Giang had refused to supply beans due to bad weather and a drop in coffee prices since 2019. As a result, a court had ordered him to pay the company nearly 5,200 kilogrammes of fresh beans as rent for the 2018-19 season. The farmer appealed, but the Court of Appeal upheld the earlier decision.
According to a resident, Giang’s orchard has about 30,000 coffee trees and more than 100 durian trees, the latter of which will bear fruit in 2023. Giang later wrote on his Facebook page that about two-thirds of the trees in his orchard had been cut down.
As they have all leased agricultural land, more than 1,000 households in Hoa Dong commune are now in a similar situation. According to an RFA source, the families bought trees on the leased land in 1998 and shared ownership with Thang Loi Coffee, which held a 51% share.
When Thang Loi became a joint-stock company, the families who had leased the land were forced to buy the company’s shares at preferential prices. Giang and others did not buy them, however, because they considered the company’s actions illegal.
Dissatisfied residents approached the President’s Office, which instructed the Dak Lak People’s Committee to solve the problem. However, the committee has not yet taken any action.
Hundreds of locals who have leased a total of 2,300 hectares (5,700 acres) of land from the company are at risk of losing all their assets, such as coffee and durian trees, the resident said.
Do Hoang Phuc, the chairman and general manager of Thang Loi Coffee Joint Stock Company, and Hoang Thi Thu Ha, the deputy general director in charge of the company’s sales, declined to comment. RFA also did not get a statement from Krong Pak Police.
In Vietnam, there is no legal concept of private land ownership. The country’s 1992 Constitution states that the government must allocate land to individuals and organisations and allow land users to transfer land use rights. The land law in 1993, after the Communist Party, initiated economic reforms and abandoned agricultural cooperatives, granted farmers 20-year leases and 7.4 hectares of land per farmer for production purposes. However, the law also stated that the farmland must be returned to the government for reallocation after 20 years. The limit on farmland enables the government to allocate land to new farmers, as about 60 per cent of the labour force is still engaged in agriculture.
