What is the Land Use Limit?

Land tenure is a term used from the previous feudal dynasties to limit the landholdings of the landlord class. In the Vietnamese legal system, there is no specific definition of the term "land tenure"; it is mentioned in only a few documents, while most documents use terms such as "land allocation limits" or "limits on the transfer of agricultural land use rights."

When the 1993 Land Law was issued, with the intention of preventing non-direct producers from buying land to exploit direct producers who had no land, the Government of Vietnam issued Decree 64/CP of 1993 which stipulated land tenure by using the term "agricultural land limits."

By the time of the 2003 Land Law, the regulations on land tenure had been split into "land allocation limits" and "limits on the transfer of agricultural land use rights" in order to provide more specific and broader regulations than those in Decree 64/CP of 1993, yet still not completely abolishing land tenure as suggested in many proposals during the development of the 2003 Land Law.

The 2013 Land Law continued utilizing the terms “land allocation limits” and “limits on the transfer of agricultural land use rights,” but with more specific provisions on the State’s recovery of agricultural land exceeding the limits, stating that only investment costs on the land would be compensated, not the land itself.

Recently, in Resolution 30/NQ-CP from the Government of Vietnam’s regular meeting in February 2017, with the aim of developing the socio-economic, enhancing the competitiveness of enterprises, the Government of Vietnam requested the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment to cooperate with the Ministry of Agriculture & Rural Development, and the Ministry of Justice to review and propose amendments to land policies, facilitating the accumulation and concentration of land, and expanding land limits for large-scale agricultural production in the third quarter of 2017.

Thus, the State still continues to use land tenure policies but with more changes and increasingly broader limits compared to previous regulations. Hopefully, in the near future, land tenure policies will receive more attention and create favorable conditions for farmers and enterprises to invest and expand large-scale agricultural production.

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