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Vietnam Natural Resources
Although Vietnam is relatively rich in natural resources, the
country's protracted state of war has precluded their proper
exploitation. Coal reserves, located mainly in the North, have
been estimated at 20 billion tons. With Soviet assistance, coal
mining has been expanded somewhat. Commercially exploitable
metals and minerals include iron ore, tin, copper, lead, zinc,
nickel, manganese, titanium, chromite, tungsten, bauxite,
apatite, graphite, mica, silica sand, and limestone. Vietnam is
deficient, however, in coking coal, which, prior to the outbreak
of hostilities with China in 1979, it traditionally imported from
the Chinese. Gold deposits are small.
Vietnam's production of crude oil and natural gas was in very
preliminary stages in the late 1980s and the amounts of
commercially recoverable reserves were not available to Western
analysts. With the cooperation of the Soviet Union, Vietnam began
exploitation of a reported 1-billion-ton offshore oil find
southeast of the Vung Tau-Con Dao Special Zone
(see
fig. 1). By
early 1987, the Vietnamese were exporting crude oil for the first
time in shipments to Japan. Production remained low, estimated at
about 5,000 barrels per day, although Vietnam's minimum domestic
oil requirements totaled 30,000 barrels per day. Despite
optimistic plans for developing offshore fields, Vietnam was
likely to remain dependent on Soviet-supplied petroleum products
through the 1990s.
Vietnam's ability to exploit its resources diminished in the
early 1980s, as production fell from the levels attained between
1976 and 1980. In the 1980s, the need to regulate investment and
focus spending on projects with a short-term payoff pointed to
continued slow development of the country's resource base, with
the exception of areas targeted by the Soviet Union for economic
assistance, such as oil, gas, coal, tin, and apatite.
Vietnam's fisheries are modest, even though the country's
lengthy coast provides it with a disproportionately large
offshore economic zone for its size. In the 1980s, Vietnam
claimed a 1-million-square- kilometer offshore economic zone and
an annual catch of 1.3 to 1.4 million tons. More than half the
fish caught, however, were classified as being of low-quality.
Schools of fish reportedly were small and widely dispersed.
As the 1990s approached,it seemed increasingly likely that
Vietnam's economy would remain predominantly agricultural. This
trend, however, did not necessarily limit attainable economic
growth since Vietnam processed a significant amount of unused
land with agricultural potential. According to Vietnamese
statistics of the mid 1980s, agricultural land then in use
theoretically could be expanded by more than 50 percent to occupy
nearly one-third of the nation. Funds and equipment for expensive
land-reclamation projects were scarce, however, and foreign
economists believed that a projected increase in agricultural
land use of about 20 to 25 percent was more realistic. Even if
the reclaimed land were only minimally productive, an increase in
land use would increase agricultural output substantially.
Both the availability of land and the density of settlement
in traditional agricultural areas--about 463 persons per square
kilometer in the Red River Delta and 366 persons per square
kilometer in the Mekong Delta-- explained much of the
government's commitment to the building of
new economic zones (see Glossary) in less-settled areas. During
the period from 1976
to 1980, only 1.5 million out of the 4 million persons targeted
for relocation actually were moved to new economic zones. The
government's Third Five-Year Plan (1981-85) called for the
relocation of 2 million people by 1985, and subsequent plans
projected the resettlement of as many as 10 million by 1999. By
the end of 1986, however, the Vietnamese reported that fewer than
3 million people had been resettled since the program began. Slow
progress in bringing new land into production, low yields on
reclaimed land, and hardships endured by resettled workers--
particularly former city dwellers, many of whom chose to return
home--testified to the problems inherent in the resettlement
program.
Data as of December 1987
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