A land reform program called Land to the Tiller was implemented in South Vietnam on March 26 1970 by the president Nguyen Van Thieu, at the height of the Vietnam War. The reform intended to solve the problem of land tenancy by taking land from the landlords who are not laboring to the tenant farmers; the landlords are then compensated. Individual land holding was limited to 15 hectares. Legal title was extended to peasants in areas under control of the South Vietnamese government to whom land had previously been distributed by the Viet Cong.
The reform was highly advertised three months prior to its application and a holiday marked it (Farmer's Day). The initiative was backed by the American government; Richard Nixon gave his support in June 1969 in the Midway communiqué, judging it favorable to the vietnamization of the conflict. In total, the United States financed 339 millions US dollars of the total 441 millions the reform cost.
According to Trung Dinh Dang, the Vietnamese Communist Party struggled to carry out the socialist transformation of agriculture in the south of Vietnam. The contemporary party leaders initially considered land reform to be a temporary measure toward mass collectivisation. In his article (2010) "“Post-1975 Land Reform in Southern Vietnam: How Local Actions and Responses Affected National Land Policy”. Dang puts out how it turned out be a source of long-term problem and turned into a conflict between the party and Southern Vietnamese. The land reform encountered unexpected difficulty in the Southern Region and its implementation could not be achieved for many years, and the result was quite different from the party's original objectives. The article argues that villagers and local landlords were two key actors who contributed to the poor performance of the land reform. Also, in order to defend their land, villagers in the Southern Region engaged not only in forms of everyday resistance (denial of rules etc.) but also in some confrontational resistance.