Viet Nam - What the hell was it all about?

Article in today’s NY Times:

PHAN THIET, Vietnam — It may be the most capitalist enterprise in Communist Vietnam — by the rich and for the rich: a proliferation of golf courses that is displacing thousands of farmers and devouring the rice fields the country depends on.

The Dai Lai golf course drove thousands off their farmland

Until last year, according to experts who have done the calculations, licenses for new courses were being issued at an average of one a week, for a total of more than 140 projects around the country.

Promoters created the idea of a “Ho Chi Minh Golf Trail,” a series of eight courses whose label is as good a sign as any of where Vietnam seems to be headed — its heroic wartime past redefined as a sales pitch. 2,000,000+ Vietnamese civilians killed 1,100,000 N. Vietnamese soldiers killed 184,000 S. Vietnamese soldiers killed

If all those projects were completed, the number of courses would approach that of golf-mad South Korea, where there are close to 200. It would still fall well short of China, which has more than 300, and would be nowhere near the number in the United States, which has about 16,000 courses, or even Florida, with 1,260.

2,984,000 Americans served in Viet Nam. 58,156 Americans killed 303,724 Americans wounded 75,000 Americans severely disabled

“Developers and foreign investors are saying they want to make the country a tourist destination, and to do that you need to offer more amenities like golf,” said Kurt Greve, the American general manager of the Ocean Dunes Golf Club and the Dalat Palace Golf Club. Most of those tourists would come from elsewhere in Asia, especially South Korea and Japan, where golf courses are hugely overcrowded.

500+/- Vietnamese civilians murdered by US forces in My Lie massacre.

Many of the new projects seem to have to do more with capitalism than with sport. Taxes on golf courses are lower than those on other forms of development, and many of the projects appear to be disguised real estate ventures.

“Golf courses are for rich people, account for vast areas of land, cause pollution and affect food security, so taxes should be appropriately high,” he told the newspaper Tuoi Tre in July.

And when rich people play, it appears that farmers and villagers pay the price.

It would seem that when the rich people play... we all pay.