was pursued on two separate channels and regions as the country was provisionally divided into two parts: South Vietnam (The Republic of Vietnam) and North Vietnam (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam), resembling the current partition of Korea. Communist North Vietnam and its southern proxies, the Viet Cong, adopted a policy of confiscating the land of landlords and rich peasants by force and redistributing it to poor and landless peasants, thus organizing the rural population into collectives. Land reform during the Vietnam War Capitalist South Vietnam failed in several land reform endeavors before finally achieving some success with the "Land to the Tiller" program in the early 1970s that was almost fully devised and supported by the United States, which considered it to be part of their policy of the Vietnamization of the war. Early land reform ordinances In 1954, South Vietnam's ally, the United States, advised the new government of South Vietnam, headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, to undertake "indispensable reforms" including land reform. In response on 8 January 1955, Diem adopted Ordinance No. 2, which capped rental of land at 25 percent of production. In October 1956, Diem adopted Ordinance No. 57 which forbade ownership by an individual of more than of rice land and prescribed the conditions and terms under which the excess land expropriated from the rich could be transferred to landless less-wealthy farmers. The U.S. would pay the landowners and receive payment from the purchasers over a 6-year period. The U.S. believed land reform was important for buildling support for the government and threatened to cut aid unless land reform and other changes were made. Under the program the government acquired from 1958 to 1961 and distributed . The land redistributed thus comprised less than 10 percent of the 7.5 million acres of cultivated land in South Vietnam. The land reform program implemented under Ordinance 57 was unpopular in the countryside. The Viet Minh had already divided up the land -- "fairly," in the words of one official. The government's program was less generous to the majority of farmers than had been the Viet Minh redistribution of land in areas which it controlled. The amount of land that individuals were permitted to retain was large, farmers were required to pay for land they acquired under the program, and the program was riddled with corruption and inefficiency. Many rural people believed that the United States army and