Overview
This SRA aimed to perform agriculture-related policy review and analysis in order to create a strong policy framework in Vietnam.
Agriculture is a focus of Vietnam’s economic development. Vietnam’s agricultural sector stands to gain from improved economic efficiency, capitalisation and technology improvement. Acknowledging this situation, the Vietnamese government has issued several groups of agricultural policies which are expected to impact on agricultural and rural development, both directly and indirectly. However, after years of development, these policies have exposed weaknesses. There is significant overlap across policies, and perhaps undue complexity. This makes it difficult for policy-makers to adequately analyse these policies to ensure they are achieving their goals of optimising agricultural and rural development. Moreover, the national and international economy is changing such that government policy is not addressing newer concerns (such as biosecurity, market-based integrated supply-chains, clean agriculture, food security, nutrition and trade).
As a first step to achieving this, the objectives of this project are as follows:
- Objective 1: To review and evaluate Vietnam’s food security policy development process and current policy direction, and to suggest ways in which the process and direction could be reformed
- Objective 2: To identify specific areas of policy research where evidence and/or tools are deficient,
- Objective 3: To build capacity in evidence-based policy analysis in Vietnam.
The project made significant progress towards building capacity through:
- Developing a greater understanding of different farming systems and food security policies,
- Teaching policy principles and evidence-based analysis for food security policy,
- Critical evaluation of Vietnam’s food security policies,
- Establishment of the Agricultural Development Policy Network (ADPN), and
- Encouraging professional report writing.
The project’s review of policy research identified several models available in Vietnam that may be used to inform evidence-based policy on food security issues in Vietnam; for example GTAP (Global Trade Analysis Project), several MONASH type single country CGE models, IMPACT and its variants, and VAST (Vietnam Agricultural SecTor model). However, use of these models for policy analysis within Vietnamese government institutions is minimal.