Hiep Hoa Commune, across the Dong Nai River from Bien Hoa, shows best the changes urbanisation has wrought.

Once its lands - like most of the southern province of Dong Nai - were used for farming. Now all that seems to have gone.

Co-operatives, storage facilities, the water pumping station and the courtyards where rice was dried are idle.

Paddy fields are covered with wild grass. Farming has declined quickly with urbanisation, explains Bien Hoa People's Committee Economics Officer director Ta Trung Quang.

Commune farmer Nguyen Van Nam used to cultivate 1,140sq. m.

But his family has not worked the land for the past three years and his three sons are employed at a factory.

"Our sons work at factory for the higher pay," he says. "But to allow the land to remain fallow is a waste."

Fellow farmer Hai Vinh says: "The young people all work at factories, only the elderly who can't work stay at home. If we want to farm, we have to hire labour which is expensive."

Like Nam and Vinh, Nguyen Van Toan with 720sq. m. of arable land wants to continue as a farmer but cannot do so because no one else will join him.

Without a farm or factory job, he harvests hay to sell to livestock breeders.

Farmers want to diversify their crops or build a house. But the inclusion of their land in the State plan stymies their ambition.

"There was once about 150ha of paddy field," says Toan. But now only 20ha is used. Farmers don't want to continue working the land because of the shortage of labour and high production costs."

The expensive irrigation system has also fallen into decline. The Hiep Hoa 1, Hiep Hoa 2 dykes and two pumping stations are unused while fruit trees along the dyke embankments go dry.

Dong Nai Agriculture and Rural Development Department deputy director Tran Dinh Minh explains apologetically: "We tried to base our construction plan on the local reality.

But after building the dykes, things turned out differently"./.