UN Support to the Vietnam’s National Target Program on the New Rural Development

The goal of the Joint Program is to integrate comparative advantage of each participating UN agencies to support the country to implement the mentioned National Target Program on New Rural Development (NTP-NRD). The NTP-NRD has the general objective of "Building up new rural areas with modern socio economic infrastructure; proper economic structure and production arrangements with strong connection between agriculture and rapid development of industries, services as well as strong linkage between rural development and planned urban development; to ensure a stable democratic rural society with national cultural richness; ecological environment is well protected; security is maintained; physical and spiritual life of people is increasingly improved under socialist orientation

In this program, UNIDO focuses on strengthening the supply capacity of the fruits & vegetables sector by apply proper technologies along the value chain. This will be supportive to the Government's vision to assist agro-based value chains that are technologically advanced and globally competitive guided by sound management practices and strong private sector participation leading to sustainable poverty reduction.

At the meeting, UNs congratulated MARD and the achievements of the NTP-NRD over period 2010-2015, specifically 1,526 communes and 15 districts have been recognized as successful models of new rural development in line with the government's set of criteria. Participating UN agencies committed to continue support the NTP-NRD next period 2016-2020.

Vice Minister of MARD, Mr. Tran Thanh Nam shared difficulties and challenges of implementing the NTP-NRD in the coming period and emphasized the further support of UN on the following key issues: (1) improving mechanism & policies to implement the NTP-NRD for rural development, taking into account of good international practices, (2) improving production organization, ensuring food safety, and strengthening market linkage (3) rural environment, (5) rural culture and security.

FAO on behalf of UN participating agencies also presented the annual report of UN Joint Program 2015 and workplan 2016. Of that, UNIDO part have supported community producer groups of vegetable & fruits value chains for better utilization of available raw material, improved production and management skills & technology, and established model of harvesting, packaging and preservation of vegetables (Centre of Excellence).

All the Steering Committee members and UN's implementing partner agencies joined the field trip to a successful model of crops restructure in Cao Phong district, Hoa Binh province. This district shifted from paddy cultivation to higher value crops including sugar cane and orange. The crops restructure have improved farmers' income a lot after 4 years of transition. Farmer can earn annual now VND 160 millions/ one ha of sugar cane and VND 600 millions/one ha of orange in comparison with VND 40 millions of paddy before. Thanks to this the income of farmers and their living conditions have improved a lot.