SoC Cassava in North-Central Vietnam: Improving smallholder incomes through inclusive business

Ethnic minority farmers located on the hillsides of North-Central Vietnam are being offered opportunities to improve their livelihoods and incomes in a sustainable way, by working together with cassava processing enterprises who want to develop cassava in an environmentally sound manner. With a grant from the Ford Foundation this value chain improvement project affected an estimated 10,000 households during the 2008-2011 period: increasing average incomes by more than 20% with additional improvements in environmental sustainability of growing practices as well as increased reliability in business relations. The companies also benefited from increased supply of cassava of higher quality. The scaling-up of the project to include 200,000 farmers is now being explored via possible collaboration between IFAD, CIAT and actors in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The potential for collaboration between farmers and processors is enormous in Vietnam and neighbouring countries as cassava is rapidly becoming a major commodity, with hundreds of thousands of smallholders supplying products to processing enterprises.

See also: Inclusive Business at SNV