[Ngo-sanrm] Vietnam: Back to Organic?

Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resources Management Working Group ngo-sanrm at ngocentre.org.vn
Sun Jan 5 14:01:22 GMT 2014


*THE DIPLOMAT* <http://splashurl.com/mzo44eu>
Vietnam: Back to Organic?

*Worried about food safety, Vietnamese look again at small-scale organic
farming. *
By Elisabeth Rosen
January 02, 2014

For two decades, Thanh was the only fruit vendor on Phan Huy Chu Street, in
the heart of Hanoi’s downtown. But last year, a store opened across the
street advertising “rau an toan” (safe produce). It was an assurance
conspicuously missing from Thanh’s baskets of lychees and mangoes,
displayed millimeters from the sidewalk.

Until recently, no one in Vietnam was talking about food safety. In the
past year, however, it has become front-page news. Rumors about
pesticide-contaminated grapes and rotten pork smuggled across the border
from China made consumers aware that they no longer knew how and where
their food was produced.

“People are used to buying from the market and not questioning it. But
there’s increasing concern, mostly in urban populations, about where food
comes from,” says Dan Dockery, who runs Highway 4, a restaurant chain with
locations in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Hoi An.

At Mr Sach, a grocery store that opened in 2010, customers fill shopping
baskets with greens from nearby Ba Vi and avocados from Moc Chau.
Everything is wrapped in transparent plastic, with a label marking its
province of origin.

“I’m really worried about the quality of the food in Vietnam, so I try to
buy safe food,” says Nguyen Thu Huong, 30, as the cashier rings up tofu,
eggs and knobs of celery. “In the media, they say using chemicals on plants
and animals is very dangerous for our health.”

Restaurants are also responding to the demand for cleaner food. Nguyen Ngoc
Lan and Nguyen Trung Chung opened Nam 76 last year, where the couple makes
traditional dishes using mushrooms grown on a friend’s organic farm just
outside the city. During lunch hour, Vietnamese office workers crowd the
three branches to eat mushroom hotpot and sticky rice topped with dried
shiitakes.

“More people in Hanoi have Facebook and Internet. They read a lot of
articles about food imported from other countries with no origin
certification. We’re getting really scared about it,” Lan says.

Last year, she figures, about 10 percent of Hanoians stopped buying at
traditional wet markets — switching instead to the organic and “safe food”
stores that are cropping up in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. A booklet issued
by the Vietnam Standard and Consumer Association lists 122 clean vegetable
stores in Hanoi; dozens more, like Mr Sach, have opened since it was
printed.

“When I moved here six years ago, I didn’t see any organic shops. Now,
there are more and more, ” says Stephanie Ralu, who runs 100%, a Ho Chi
Minh City retailer offering traceable food
products<http://blog.100percentvn.com/tag/hcmc/>made in Vietnam.

The primary customers at these new stores are young, educated Vietnamese
women. After speaking to Huong, I meet Tran Hung Van, 31, who works in an
office all week but drives four kilometers every weekend to buy fruit at Mr
Sach. “I have young children. I want to make sure that the food they eat is
safe,” she tells me.

Vietnam’s demand for organic produce comes as a UN report makes the case
that the world should be moving away from industrialized
agriculture<http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/ditcted2012d3_en.pdf>.
Titled “Wake Up Before It’s Too Late,” the report urges countries to return
to the small-scale, organic model that Vietnam practiced for centuries.

Nearly all farming is still done on a small scale, with most individual
farmers owning less than an acre. But organic hasn’t been the rule since
the 1970s, when the country faced a critical food shortage and
productivity-boosting chemicals offered the chance to fill empty plates.

“Vietnam was in a state of hunger, so they needed to address the issue of
food security as well as exports,” explains Eduardo Sabio, regional
representative at VECO Vietnam, an NGO working on sustainable agriculture.
“Rice and vegetables got a lot of subsidies from the government in terms of
fertilizers and pesticides.”

The transition to a market economy in the late 1980s increased dependence
on these chemicals. For the first time, farmers were growing vegetables for
profit. Unaware of the consumer backlash that was taking place in many
Western countries, they saw artificial fertilizers as an easy way to boost
output.

“People wanted to make money fast, so they got lots of chemicals to make
crops grow faster,” says Tran Trung Chinh, who started Mr
Sach<http://www.mrsach.com.vn>in 2010. “Everyone used them. But people
got a lot of diseases as a result.
Now, after 20 years, everybody knows the chemicals are dangerous.”

Governments in Southeast Asia are eagerly ditching traditional agriculture
for large-scale and increasingly globalized production. But integration
into global trade networks comes at a price. Thailand aggressively
industrialized
its agriculture
system<http://www.developmentprogress.org/sites/developmentprogress.org/files/resource_report/thailand_report_-_master.pdf>in
the 1960s and in the late 1990s was one of the most enthusiastic
developing Asian countries to plunge into international free trade
agreements <http://www.unescap.org/tid/publication/aptir2436_zamroni.pdf>.
Yet few producers reaped the benefits. Today, many Thai farmers suffer
crippling
debt<http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/06/thailands-other-protests-pro-sustainable-food/57506/>—
and consumers in Bangkok are flocking
to farmers’ markets<http://www.bangkokpost.com/lifestyle/family/386544/the-environment-a-year-in-review>in
search of organic produce.

As the Trans-Pacific Partnership stirs international controversy for its
intellectual property regulations, it’s worth asking whether such free
trade agreements will also destroy efforts to reform local food systems by
making countries even more dependent on products from overseas.

“There will definitely be big implications for agriculture,” Sabio says.
“If Vietnam opens up their doors to imported products, they will be swamped
with certain commodities that are much cheaper to acquire than produced
locally. Most likely, companies will corner most of the benefits. Farmers
will be pressured more and more because the prices of their commodities
will be subjected much more to external pressures.”

However, less trade with Trans-Pacific partners would likely mean more
trade with China, which remains Vietnam’s largest trade
partner<http://atlas.media.mit.edu/country/vnm/>even as concerns about
the safety of Chinese imports grow. Given the many
food safety scandals that have roiled Chinese exports to Vietnam in the
last few years – anesthesia-tainted
fish<http://vietnamnews.vn/opinion/op-ed/239408/food-safety-fears-mount-amid-china-scandal.html>,
carcinogenic sunflower
seeds<http://vietnamnews.vn/social-issues/health/236629/imported-sunflower-seeds-to-be-tested-for-dangerous-additives.html>–
Vietnam has reason to be wary of China. Yet many feel the country
cannot
afford to antagonize its big neighbor.

Can Vietnam forge a successful return to small-scale organic agriculture?
“Mr Sach” thinks so. Owner Chinh doesn’t just sell products; he also runs
educational programs for consumers and training programs for farmers to
convince them of the benefits of organic practices.

“It’s my mission to make people understand about organic food,” Chinh says.
“It’s very important if we want to keep Vietnam safe.”

*Elisabeth Rosen is based in Hanoi, where she is an editor at *Word Vietnam*,
a national culture and lifestyle magazine. She has previously written for *The
Atlantic* and *DestinAsian*, among other publications.*


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*71 Tran Quoc Toan, Hanoi*

*M    +8 490 342 0769*

*E     chuckusvn at gmail.com <chuckusvn at gmail.com>*

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