Transcript for the Piece Audio version of The Price of Rice

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.prx.org/javascripts/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js?1245057264">The Price of Rice

BILLBOARD: :59

Vietnam has overcome years of war and environmental devastation to become the worlds 2nd largest exporter of rice...

LANH: but now 10 million people suffer from lacking of rice

SGS: joining the global marketplace has exacted a price on vietnam

KIEN: We are suffering from the consequences of intensified farming.

SGS: Can sustainable agriculture help to solve the Asian food crisis?

PHUONG: So we just...Give them the tools to produce enough food for family...and to protect the environment

In this hour, Outer Voices travels to Vietnam and Laos to find out.. This is the Price of Rice

Segment A

VIET-NAR T18
You’re listening to The Price of Rice from Outer Voices.

VIET-NAR T19
Outer Voices is a series of audio profiles of women peacemakers in southeastAsia and the Pacific Islands.

VIET-NAR T20
I’m Stephanie Guyer-Stevens.

VIET-NAR T19
In the next hour, you'll hear from the voices of Vietnam's sustainable agriculture movement.

VIET-NAR T40
This is the Price of Rice.

STE-139 – ceremony chanting
T131 (hmong music)
STE-128 – chanting

Hanoi ambi bed STE-022
File1013

VIETNAR T50
I really began to understand that the story of the environment in Vietnam is really understanding the story of aftermath of war. The environmental devastation of war. And I hadn't really thought about that before. 0:00:15.2

VIET-NAR T55
So I went to Vietnam and Laos in the summer of 2007 and 2008 and I went there in order to meet Tranh Thi Lanh who is the founder of SPERI,

VIETNAR T61
0:00:27.7
which is the social policy ecological research institute.

VIET-NAR T55
because of all the work that she's done on environmental issues, she seemed like the perfect person to really lead me into an understanding of the situation with the price of rice in Vietnam.

Top of the piece Chanting and music fades

T001
Lanh: My name is Tranh T. Lanh. I am from center part of Vietnam.

Lanh: The village name is Tu Mi – Tu it mean for Mii it mean beauty.

Pumpkin song

T090 53:48
… L:
. So when we fighting against American we win over. And the whole country the world oh Vietnam is number one.

I also didn't really understand how much I didn't understand about the Vietnam war. That was a big one.. I mean we’ve been working in southeast asia all these years so by default we’ve been working in the aftermath of war but I really saw it entirely differently by looking at it through the lens of the environment of the country .

And everybody's tone of voice changed alot when they started talking about the impact of the war. The impact that agent orange has had on their kids and their cropland.

T090 53:48
… L: Forest and nature you see that like dioxins and bombing disasting nature.

One of the most fertile parts of their country you know the central part of Vietnam is just completely devastated environmentally. Because of the agent orange because that was the locus of the military action and military controls was because it was the center of the country.

T090 53:48
Looking at ourselves we are exhausting. You know all our efforts is finish. People become very very tired. Nature diversity bombing and everywhere is bombing. The country I think very very exhausting.

And then we start to think about how to regenerate, nature, education, everything togethers.

new narration:

since the war, the people of Vietnam have become dependent on chemical agriculture, because of the pressures of the global economy – Lanh’s organization, speri, has been established to counteract that. To find ways for people to sustain themselves independently of the global economy.

Driving ambi
STE-088
File0911
STE-022

VO_51
ALT: VO_52
T: We’re driving on the Ho Chi Minh trail. During the American war the communist troops along here, carrying weapons and people to the south, along the Lao Cambodia border.

VO_51
ALT: VO_52
Because the Ho Chi Minh trail goes through here, there was terrible fighting here in Quan Chin, and all the grasses were killed from Agent Orange.

VIETNAR77
… we're on our way to visit the Malieng village Tuan points out to me that the Malieng were living in the mountains that were the most heavily bombed by napalm and agent orange. This was absolutely devastating to their food supply. For the past many decades they've lived a very marginal existence, until fairly recently when the Vietnamese government resettled them into this one village. And now they're learning how to grow gardens in one spot, and that's new information for them.
0:01:19.7

VIETNAR 76
so now we're arriving at the homeland of the Malieng, this is the Malieng village, this is Ke village. In order to get there though. We have to cross a river.

AMBI – exit van, walk to river, paddle across river
T087
STE-094 6;00
Paddling ambi

Paddling ambi
VIETNAR 76
The Vietnamese government had offered to the Malieng to build a bridge and the Malieng had said no we don’t want a bridge. So instead they have a boat.

AMBI BED
T114
HOW ABOUT IF WE ADD SOME WALKING IN HERE?

VIETNAR 82
…the river that we just crossed is the Ca Tang river. and we're now in the Ke village, which is home to about 70 families of the Malieng,… There's a total of about 1400 Malieng still living in Vietnam. There's probably another 1000 living in Cambodia.

VIETNAR 78
… it's July, and it's hot, it's so hot. and everything is entirely still. And the only sound is the cicadas.

VIETNAR 78
we meet the village leader. His name is Kao Zum. And he is the head of the clan that lives at Ke Village.

Kao Zum is well shy of five feet tall. He's wearing a striped western style dress shirt and black dress pants and bare feet.

STE-107 = Viet
VO_54 = English (MISPRONOUNCES KAO ZUM & MALIENG, SEZ KAO YUNG & MAY LING)
ALT: VO_53,
KAO ZUM: My name is Kao Zum, I'm the Malieng people. I am a village leader of Ke village, and also the member of the district or communal council.

STE-105 = Viet
VO_56 = Eng (MISPRONOUNCES MALIENG, SEZ MAY LING)
ALT: VO_55
KAO ZUM: we are the Malieng people. In the past we used to live in the mountains, at the top of the stream, in caves in the forest. We were nomadic people, living in the mountains between Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

VIETNAR83
Resettlement can be acompletely devastating, situation for people. Agriculturally culturally economically socially, on every level.

STE-105 = Viet
VO_83 = Eng
ALT: VO_57, VO_58,
KAO ZUM: The government moved us down to a flat area at the bottom of the mountains. Of course we are thankful to the government but it wasn’t easy for us to live there. Before we generally did slash and burn cultivation, but now we have to learn a new way of production so it is more difficult for us.

VIETNAR83
When a group of people are moved out of a place that they've lived for many many years - into a new place, they don’t know necessarily how to grow food in that new place, they don't know where to find food, they can't build the same houses that they're accustomed to, they don't have any relationships with the neighbors or with the neighboring communities. It can be an almost impossible equation.

VO_63 = Eng

TOAN: But the problem wasn’t just how they grew their food. When the Vietnamese government moved the Malieng they built them concrete houses. They didn’t know that the Malieng house was built in a very special way, and if the house wasn’t built in that style they would not be able to live in it. Their house is the core of their whole culture. It is extremely sophisticated design that determines their whole family relationships, and their relationships with their ancestors.

STE-105 = Viet
VO_66 = Eng
ALT: VO_67
KAO ZUM THE POLES OF THE HOUSE ARE CHOSEN BY THE HOUSE OWNER. The pole chosen for the center is considered a spiritual pole.
This pole can only be cut from a tree that has never been cut before; that is still alive;

and that is completely without branches for the length which is used for the core of the house. This is the pole that the dead use to climb from the floor up to the roof and then out of the house.

SPERI TOOK THE TIME TO FIGURE OUT WHAT THE MALIENG PEOPLE NEEDED, AND ALL OF A SUDDEN RESETTLEMENT NOT ONLY BECAME POSSIBLE, IT BECAME DESIRABLE, AT LEAST FOR THE MALIENG HERE IN KE VILLAGE.

STE-105 = Viet
VO_62 = Eng
ALT: VO_59, VO_60, VO_61, VO_62,
KAO ZUM: Then SPERI came to help us learn sustainable agriculture techniques, and this is working very very well for us. So now that we’ve learned wet rice production it’s very good.

STE-108 = VIET
VO_68 = ENG
ALT: VO_69, VO_70
KAO ZUM: We are learning village life. We’re now growing crops, building houses, and we now grow enough rice to feed everyone in our village.

STE-108 = VIET
VO_72 = ENG
ALT: VO_71
KAO ZUM: I am very proud because now, with better nutrition, my grandchildren are much taller than me already.

STE108 viet – laugh
0:06:53.0

VIETNAR 85
as we're leaving the village … as we walked down the path to the river two men appeared carrying a paddle… and as we got into the canoe one of them got into the back of the boat and paddled us back across the river.

AMBI – crossing river pt 2
STE-111

NARRATION:
SPERI WORKS IN LAOS BECAUSE THERE ARE A LOT MORE PEOPLE who have kep t their traditional land use practices THERE WHO ARE STILL DOING SUBSISTENCE SCALE AGRICULTUR, AND BECAUSE THE HMONG IN LAOS PRACTICE SUSTAINABLE FORESTRY. IT’S APRT OF THEIR CULTURE, THEIR RELIGION. SO SPEIR GOES TO LAOS TO LEARN FROM THE HMONG, AND SO TUAN TAKES US THERE TO LEARN WHAT THEY’RE LEARNING.

Hmong villagers were moved to Long Lan village after the war, so in 1975.
ONCE WE GET THERE TO LONG LAN IT’S RAINING, MONSOON RAINS.

T: If their traditional identity is lost, they will lose everything.
They protect the forest, it mean they protect themselves.
The villagers select the mountain near the village for the worshipping. And at the beginning when they arrive here in 1975 they have to bring one chicken to go to that mountain to worship and they believe that mountain is their mother or father. So mother and father always protect their children. The children is the villagers.
0:08:08.2
T: And when the people get better, they always have to bring something to say thanks to their mother and father. And also they have to tie string on the tree in the mountain in order to keep the relationships between children and father, mother.

NARRATION: NOW TUAN IS TRANSLATING FOR THE LEADER OF THE HMONG, KE SU ZANG

T118 = LAO
VO_75 = ENG
ALT: VO_74
KE SU ZANG: My name is Ke Su Zang. I am the head of the clan, Zang. I am also the traditional leader of the Long Lan village.

T118 = LAO
VO_79 = ENG
ALT: VO_76, VO_77. VO_78
KE SU ZANG: The Hmong people lived in Lao in this area almost 200 years ago. Normally the Hmong people like to live in the cool areas, in the highest mountains, where the forest is very good. When we were moved back here in 1975 the forest was cut down. It was very hot and we were not happy with that. So we decided we needed to protect the forest, and help the trees grow back again.

NARRATION HERE TO SAY PHUONG EXPLAINS HOW SPERI ACTS AS A TRANSLATOR BETWEEN THE HMONG AND THE PROVINCIAL GOVNERNMENT. NARRATE HER ID

VIET-NARRT 32
Phoung again.

P: So the provincial authority of Luang Prabang really concerned to protect the forest too. So the communities and the provincial authorities have the same needs to protect the forest. And we SPERI, we recognize that point. We try to make a link between communities and province level.

P: For example we know that the watershed, is the concern of the authorities. So when we give information to them we only mention about watershed. The importance of watershed and how to maintain it by the communities without, without paying any budget from government, so the authorities "whoo! ok! excellent!" (laughs)
0:11:36.6

T088 approx 20:00
L: I think that now we really want to link between Vietnam and Lao, so Vietnamese village can learn from Lao traditional village. Because they still have a very strong community structures, and traditional community structure.

VIET-NARRT21
0:00:29.3
I'm Stephanie Guyer-Stevens from outer voices

NARRATION
All the work that speri does is grounded in the idea that real understanding of the land comes form the people who have always live d close to it so that means going back to indigenous people and bringing that to the rest of Vietnam because the rest of Vietnam is in big trouble in the aftermath of war Vietnam is in big trouble and is at a tipping point.

LANH GRABBED ME AND DRAGGED ME AROUND THE COUNTRY - with a real URGENCY AND INTENSITY - SHE WANTS ME TO SEE WHAT IS GOING ON. BUT CAN SPERI GET THIS WORKING BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE?

VIET-NARRT23
stay tuned for the price of rice

BREAK MUSIC

Segment B

VIET-NARRT21
0:00:29.3
I'm Stephanie Guyer-Stevens from outer voices

VIET-NARRT 44
This is the Price of Rice

Scene: At the school
Night ambi – insects/jungle

VIETNART 95
It's late at night and we cross the into Vietnam we're on a very little dark dirt road and pull into the speri farm school called hepa.

VIETNART 96
… it turns out that they have a really big piece of land, it's 400 hectares, covering a huge area of forest as well as farmland on the confluence of two rivers…

BRING IN RIVER AMBI HERE SINCE YOU JUST MENTIONED THE RIVERS
T119 birds

File0048 8:54
Phuong: we have 400 hecatres of forest, which means we have big space.
VIETNART32
Phoung is the administrative director of speri.

File0048 8:54
PHUONG: The pilot here is focused on permaculture. We just play on the landscape, how it is designed naturally.

NARRATION: This farm School is here to teach young farmers, mostly high school age or older whose villages were converted to chemical agriculture after the war, so a lot of their traditional farming practices although they’ve persisted they’ve been fractured, so the farm school is also a place where information is collected from older people who still know the old techniques, and the school becomes a kind of intersction between all this information.

File0048 8:54
PHUONG: In term of field school we have three levels- we have pilot in the field school.

File0048 8:54
And then we have the model in the communities and the last one we have model in the household.

VIETNART97
i wake up early in the morning before the sun gets up over the mountains, and we're right on a river
it's just this very beautiful, placid river, surrounded by forest, it could be anywhere in the world

AMBI – chickens & chopping
STE-032
STE-122
T064
T058
STE-034

NARRATION: SO FIRST THING THAT HAPPENS IS I GET TO MEET THE STUDENTS

SGS: And it's still a very young experiment. not huge numbers of kids have graduated from these schools yet. But the kids I met were all very optimistic and really excited to be a part of it. They genuinely seemed really interested in farming and they genuinely had real opinions about how things were going in their communities.

VIETNART 106
Kien is our translator at the farm school and she has a very special relationship with all of the farm school students. She's not alot older than them but they really look to Kien for guidance ... So it's Kien that translates for us.

TAKE OUT HELLO, HELLO, BUT MORE TIME HEARING STUDENTS BEFORE TRANSLATION – KEEP MC MC

creaking door
viet
buzz saw in the background probably need to refer to it, what was going on? It’s so pervasive in the recordings.

AMBI – STE034

file0055 - SANRIUchem fertilizer still lack food ENG-02 = ENG
STE-025 - SANRIUchem fertilizer still lack food + tree fertilizer VN-03.R = VIET
STUDENT 1: Even if we follow and use chemical fertilizer, we are still lack of food. We continue doing other job just to buy chemical fertilizer, so money it just enough just to buy chemical fertilizers.

SGS: They may be contributing to the gross national product but they're not benefiting as a result of that.

STE-025 – inherited = VIET
f file0054 - KIEN family should grow own ENG-07 = ENG
STUDENT 2: I support the idea that more families should grow their own cropsIf we we grow more food for ourself control of their own supplies, local people in my village can be inherited from our father, our mother's knowledge and experiences on the land.

VIETNART 107
so all of these young farmer students come from farming villages themselves, … And they're all coming to the studying sustainable agriculture from the same questions as farmers here, I mean is there a way that we can support ourselves doing sustainable agriculture, is it going to be viable are we going to make money doing this its' exactly you know it's the same questions there as it is here.

STE-025 - selfsufficiency-01 = VIET
file0054 - selfsufficiency -01.L = ENG
Student 3: first of all being self-sufficient would mean that.we wouldn't be facing a food crisis. And we are enough food for ourselves first, so we don't suffer from price fluctuation… If you doing commercial crop once the price change you could lose all. We need to exchange with outsider, but it must be coming from small first, and then bigger and bigger, and I think that is sustainability.

T62 ABOUT 49:00
It’s an interesting time to be doing this piece when we're seeing the collapse of the global economy. It's an interesting time to posit what alternatives are. As more realistic alternatives instead of just fairytales. Like maybe some people might see sustainable ag as a fairy tale and now it's like, well, maybe that makes a lot of sense. I don’t know.

VIETNART99 … I meet up with Lanh… she's going to walk me around the farm and show me all of the different parts of the farm... and the systems that they've created.

8:54 – I’M GETTING A GRASP ON WHAT THEY’RE DOING HERE – SHE SHOWS ME HOW THEY’VE PLANNED THE WATER AND THE ROADS AND THE FOREST AND THE FIELDS TO ALL INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER – REAL GENIUS BEHIND ALL THIS PLANNING, AND IT’S REALLY BEAUTIFUL. THE WAY THE JUNGLE FLOWS OUT INTO THE FIELDS WHEREVER IT’S NOT HACKED BACK BY MACHETES.
AMBI – WALKING
STE-013

T021? – kids n buckets, possibly wrong language
Irrigation ditch
Pigs STE
Chickens
FISH – STE120 @8:00
Quang Binh farm ambi

File0112

file 112
ready? Yeah

ok this morning we are going around HEPA seeing different places
3:28
Thu asking something of Lanh in Viet and Lanh answering

File0112
Lanh: So here also is the really intensive of the nature diversity. And another side -- intensive of culture diversity. And this one also like a cross-border between the south and the north. And this also the west border between Vietnam and Lao. Very sensitive areas.

File0112
Lanh:
42:00 walking and cicadas
42:29 hello in Viet
Lanh: and this plot belonging to the three students you may know already, so they try to create different experimental. this one black soybean.

MORE WALKING AMBI HERE – can use ste013, ste014, ste 046, ste047, ste048, ste093, ste102, ste105, ste124, ste125, ste126, ste134, T160, T054, T055

MORE WALKING AMBI HERE
AMBI – chickens & chopping

AMBI – bamboo water trough
MORE WALKING AMBI HERE
T014

BAMBOO spillways empty water from the stream into the pond, which aerates the water for the fish. Pumpkins are grown on trellises in the far end of the pond, providing the fish with shade. And with food from their leaves.
file 0113 0:23
LANH: so you see the managing water system for farming. So you can see this one is the spillways. The storing water, we have a water pond here.
walking
L: here? this is good station for water, running down for fish pond.
L: there are many different function eh?

IN THE SHADE OF A GROVE OF BANANA TREES DOWN BEHIND THE KITCHEN LANH SHOWS ME THEIR HERBAL MEDICINE
GARDEN

MORE WALKING AMBI HERE
Look for T117, 118, and 119 – moving branches in herbal forest
File0112
Lanh:
24:07 you see that all of this is a herbal medicine.
24:27 this one when you are feeling stomach hurt.

12:10
ALSO HERE AT THE FARM SCHOOL ARE A GROUP OF TRADITIONAL HERBALISTS. WHEN WE FIND THEM THEY’RE OUT IN THE FIELD, HUDDLED AROUND A PLANT THAT THEY’RE IDENTIFYING. WITH THEM IS TU – HE TRANSLATES FOR US.

T044
TU: The fern used for the eye, strengthen the eyes especially for those who is cannot see clearly,
S: And you eat it?
Tu: Yes eat it. to strengthen your eyes.
S: I better eat alot of those.

AMBI – herbalists identifying herbs
T051

AMBI
T050

T044
TU: three of them come from the Hmong people, from Simacai district. Lao Cai province. Two of them are Thai people from Ne An province, central Vietnam. One of them is Khin Vietnamese people from Ha Tinh province, central Vietnam.

VIETNART 109
They're from all over Vietnam and also from Laos, and they're speaking several different languages and they’ve been gathered together here to work together to create a book … they' re trying to compile all the information about all these herbs in different languages into one book …

T044
TU : So basically what they do is they share each other's every herb that they know, and they describe about one hundred fifty different herb species. And on each page you can see on the right hand is the picture of the herbs. The first is what it call in Hmong language. The second is how it call in Thai language, and third is how it call in Vietnamese language. And the fourth is how it call in scientific language, latin name. Otherwise if we just only write in Vietnamese in Latin name the local people cannot know.

VIETNART 109
they can exchange this information among themselves and also have it available to young people that want to learn from them.

T044
TU: And in the future you know they share the book is firstly keep for themselves in their generation, because they own that information. Because they own that book.

Scene – farmhouse
Cooking
Chopping ambi

VIETNART 111
so you know what the herbalists are doing is … a really incredible example of how this is working and how it can work successfully. But it's not working perfectly for everybody. Sustainable agriculture can be a very tough way to make a living…

Thu is a recent graduate from the university where she studied agriculture. Shes's about 21 years old when we meet her and her her family has actually … moved here to try their hand at sustainable agriculture.

And so when we go up to her family's house we meet thu and her mother and they explain to us what the situation's been like for them.

STE-062 - Lanh childhood friend VN-01.L = VIET
VO_21 = ENG
ALT: VO_20, VO_01
THU’S MOM: Lanh and I were childhood friends. We grew up in the same village, but we hadn’t seen each other for 30 years. I had been growing commercial rice, but I heard about Lanh and her work on the environment and organic farming in the news. I met up with her again, and she convinced me to try organic farming. So I moved here, to this farm by HEPA, leaving my husband, alone back in Sun Lao commune for four months. Now, my husband, son and daughter are all here with me too.

file0065 - when talk about my family VN FINDCUT-01 = VIET
VO_24 = ENG
ALT: VO_22, VO_23
THU: When we start to talk about my family’s situation, I really want to cry. Trying to decide between the conditions here and back at Sun Lao - it is very tough to judge what is best for us.

STE-063 - organic safe but low yield VN-01.L = VIET
VO_02, VO_03, VO_04 = ENG
THU'S MOM: We don’t generate enough income from this farm. We definitely have to seek out new ways of thinking, to be able to support ourselves to stay here.
Here the air and the environment are really clean, and the organically grown food is very safe to eat. But using organic agriculture techniques, the crop yield itself is quite low so far.

file0065 - my parents used to lowland VN FINDCUT-02 = VIET
VO_38 = ENG
ALT: VO_37
Thu: My parents are so used to growing wet rice, in the lowland. That kind of rice grows in a very different kind of soil, and with lots of water. My family hasn’t grown upland rice before. We’re really afraid, not wanting to risk growing upland rice since we don’t know how.

STE-063 - organic safe but low yield VN-01.L = VIET
VO_07 = ENG
ALT: VO_05, VO_06
THU'S MOM: Back in Sun Lao commune we grow with chemical fertilizer. Clearly the yield is greater. We're near a market, and we're able to sell the extra rice to for money to buy the rest of the food we need.

VIETNART 112
so this is the dilemma. When they were growing commercial rice they were able to grow enough for them to, for their own use as well as for them to sell.

STE-065 - both moving back + as a parent VN FINDCUT-08.R = VIET
VO_13 = ENG
ALT: VO_12
THU'S MOM: Everyone has to calculate cost and benefit in every single thing that we do.
I was thinking of both of my husband and I moving back to Sun Lao commune, just to grow 3 sao of rice.
Probably we gain 3 million vietnamese dong - about $170 US dollars.

STE-065 - both moving back + as a parent VN FINDCUT-07.R = VIET
VO_16 = ENG
ALT: VO_14, VO_15
THU'S MOM: Here on this farm I share a lot of the work with my son, As a parent, if I were to leave I would be worried. Would he be able to manage the whole farm?

file0065 - crops 2 market + daughter VN FINDCUT-03 = VIET
VO_44, VO_46, VO_48, VO_49, VO_50 = ENG
ALT: VO_39, VO_40, VO_41, VO_42, VO_43, VO_45, VO_47,
THU: Who can say what the right answer is? Maybe if only my parents moved back to Sun Lao to grow rice, and leave the land here for my brother and myself to continue working. As a daughter, I value my family alot. I want to see the whole family better. But maybe that’s not yet possible.

THU’S MOM: This has been a very difficult time for us.

VO_18 = ENG
ALT: VO_17, VO_19
THU'S MOM: It’s really hard to come up with clear answer

T63 about 11:00
SGS: Relying on your annual rice harvest can be a very sketchy business. it's not necessarily going to be an easy path or a reliable one for sure.
the result is as people are forced to become less and less self-reliant they have to turn to other means of supporting themselves.
AMBI – cutting
STE-079

T63 approx 22:00
SGS: 4 in the morning we leave the farm to go to the train station right and there's many motorcycles out and they have what looks like it could be pool cue cases slung over their shoulders with panniers on their back and it's guns and they've got animals you know I mean it's just it is a smugglers junction there and that is one thing she wanted to do is she set the kids up to be stopping the smuggling even if it's just on their acreage it's like no. We're not doing this here. We're going to do something really different.

LANH: So that when we see this area become very dangerous.
LANH: smuggling coming passing over here. And of course we feel very angry. But we do not say anythings. We left them be.

VIETNART 115
Now I've begun to realize that Lanh put this school here on purpose. She wanted to put this school right in the middle of this whole smuggling region as a way to stop the smuggling, to stop the illegal logging to stop the poaching that's going on in the region.

VIETNART 116
when they do actually find people who are smuggling they become angry naturally but they don't act angry they will say oh you know come sit down and eat something you have some tea.

LANH: And when they coming here to hunting or to logging, they to talk with them very smoothly. We explaining to them that, if surrounding here is disasting, how can this one surviving? You have to respect nature.

VIETNART 116
and they try to one person at a time educate the people in the area about what they're trying to do there at the farm school. How they're trying to stop the smuggling and why. What the larger reasons are for it.

LANH: So we explaining that if you cutting everything here, hunting everything here you go flooding everything. Like five years ago here. Many people die here. So explain very smooth and very slowly.

VIETNART 117
she shows me you know where the students have placed little bundles of incense in the crook of a tree or at the base of a tree or at a special rock…
.
File0117 approx 13:00
LANH: … They make incense here. You see? every tree. they don't cut it, when they build the roads.

VIETNART 117
She points out to me that this is the students making their offerings. they're making offerings to the nature spirits that live in the jungle…

Walkaround with Lanh
So that they have to keep their values, their civilization, their behave their harmonize with nature. It's not backwards. It not superstition. It's a human adaptation with different conditions. We want to confirm that people women children youth and elder... they recognize that they are very valuable.

T64
0:01:03.1
The thing I will never forget is the day that we went up it was the day that we were doing this big ceremony. It was like re-introducing the nature spirits to the land, they were all going to walk up to the highest point, to invite all of the spirits to inhabit the land And just walking through the jungle on the path was all by itself was just it was the first time I'd really been that deep in the Vietnamese jungle too and that was that was really awesome.
Being up there on top of the mountain with the wind - it's just - perfect. It was the nicest day I've had in a long time.

Scene - the sacred tree ceremony
AMBI – bells & chanting
STE-139
STE-128
Talking, Chau’s mother chanting

Credits – The Price of Rice

Major underwriting for The Price of Rice was provided by:

The Shelly and Donald Rubin Foundation and,
The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Additional funding by the Lucius and Eva Eastman Foundation, the LEF Foundation and many other generous donors.

The Price of Rice was produced by Stephanie Guyer-Stevens for Outer Voices
Story Consultant was Catherine Stifter
Audio Editor was Jack Chance
Location Recording by Jack Chance and Simon Dearnaley
Additional narration recording by Claire Schoen.
Audio production assistance by Marisa Benzle
Transcription assistance by Claire Kinnison
Mix Engineer was Robin Wise of Sound Imagery
Pre-production field research by Cathy Hoang
Production Assistant in Vietnam and Laos was Karoline Kemp
Translators in Vietnam and Laos were Tu Kien Dang, Quang Tu Pham,
and Trong Tuan Dam
Research assistants were Sheena Stevens, Raina Davis, and Karoline Kemp.
Voiceovers were performed by Chinh Nguyen, Kim Thuy, and Maisie Nguyen.
Traditional music, recorded by Jack Chance. And Archives of Traditional Music In Laos

Many thanks to Tranh Thi Lanh, Minh Phuong Nguyen, and the entire staff of SPERI.
Thanks to the staff of Green Discovery in Luang Namtha, Laos.
Many thanks to the people of Ke, Ta Phin, Long Lan and Xien Da villages, Ban May Commune, and to the people of the villages in Luang Namtha conservation area, for their hospitality.
Thanks to Duy Khoi Do and to the class K1A of the HEPA farmer field school.
Thanks also to Carol Kresge, of The Language Project, Luang Prabang, Laos, and to and to Dan Imhoff, of Watershed Media.
Many thanks to Nha Pho and Nguyen Thanh Thuy for their assistance with music.
Special thanks to Dolly Oberti and Charlie Rinn, and to Wade Davis and Gail Percy for their hospitality.

The Price of Rice is the fifth in a series of profiles of women leaders in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands by Outer Voices.
To obtain a copy of this program, please call (415)497-0563.
Or, visit our website: www.outervoices.org

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