It’s a mind-bender flying from Ho Chi Minh City, with its luxury hotels and swank restaurants, to Thanh Hoa, where I spent a day with small-time rice farmers up in the hills. In Thanh Hoa they still use water buffalo to pull their plows, and transplant rice seedlings the same way they did a thousand years ago. Only now the seedlings are hi-tech new breeds, and they’re using the latest techniques to fertilizer. The result: One lady who shared tea with us showed us, in her two-room hut, a new television set, paid for with the small profit she made on her acre of rice.