Week 8: Leslie Do

Leslie Do
ASA 189F, Dr. Valverde
20th February 2016

Viet Nam's Challenges: Triple Threat

There are three major factors that hinder the development of Viet Nam’s national image of sustainability and undermine Viet Nam’s national sovereignty; they are the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the legacy of Agent Orange in Viet Nam, and commercialization and fragmentation of the state (and the privatization of state functions,) which stagnates Viet Nam’s surplus growth (Gurtov, 1, 2015; Cohn, 2015; Pincus, 26, 2015). For instance, since the TPP essentially serves the interests of multinational corporations and gives them the same power of nation-states, the TPP weakens Viet Nam’s national aesthetic of agricultural sustainability, because the agribusiness exports (from other countries like the US) will “undercut locally produced goods” and will increasingly displace impoverished Vietnamese farmers from their land (Gurtov, 1, 2015).

Additionally, the TPP can threaten the public health of the masses in Viet Nam by disempowering its “environmental, health, and safety laws,” which can create estranged bonds between government, people, and industry in Viet Nam, because, by applying multinational corporations’ sense of international standards of products and goods to all partners of the TPP, more dioxins and toxins of Monsanto’s pesticides (from Monsanto’s unregulated, industrial productions and the TPP’s “reduction of environmental and public-health protections”) can harm the people’s health and their farmlands for future generations -- such as shorten their lifespan and make their lands infertile through deforestation (Gustav, 1, 2015; Cohn, 2015). However, despite the long-term dangers of the TPP towards Viet Nam’s public health, agricultural land, and national sovereignty, Viet Nam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, Minister of Industry and Trade Vu Huy Hoang still signed the TPP on February 4th, 2016. Although the TPP claims to provides rules to resolve issues of intellectual property, labor, and e-commerce, how will the TPP exacerbate these issues since it serves coporations rather than public interest (Bizhub, 2016)? How does the TPP’s “promised benefits for Asia citizens”  influence Vietnamese people to uncritically accept the TPP and distracts them from challenging its effects on Viet Nam’s sovereignty?

However, the TPP isn’t the only  threat to Viet Nam’s sovereignty and national image development; for example, the commercialization and fragmentation of Viet Nam contributes to Viet Nam’s economic development slowdown, because both processes “discourages investment in large-scale, technologically and managerially demanding investment projects” (Pincus, 29. 2015). Therefore, how can the Vietnamese diaspora help the government, people, and industries of Viet Nam overcome the commercialization and the fragmentation of the state and protect Viet Nam’s sovereignty from the TPP through new forms of homeland politics, direct governmental involvement in Viet Nam, and popular resistance globally and domestically?

Bibliography

Cohn, Marjorie. "Agent Orange: Terrible Legacy of the Vietnam War." The Huffington Post. The Huffington Post, 1 May 2015. Web. 20 Feb. 2016.

Gurtov, Mel. "The Trans-Pacific Partnership: A Deeply Flawed Partnership." (2015): 1.

Pincus, Jonathan. "Why Doesn't Vietnam Grow Faster?: State Fragmentation and the Limits of Vent for Surplus Growth." Journal of Southeast Asian Economies (JSEAE) 32.1 (2015): 26-29.

"TPP Officially Signed, Promising Benefits for Asia Pacific Citizens." Bizhub. Viet Nam News, 5 Feb. 2016. Web. 20 Feb. 2016.