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Tropentag, September 18 - 20, 2019 in Kassel
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Future of Rural E-Commerce Development for Vietnamese Organic Agriculture
Phuong Nguyen
Ideal Farm Corp, Vietnam
Abstract
Organic agriculture in Vietnam develops slowly, but spreads in some provinces. The slow growth of organic agriculture is partly a consequence of the orientation of agricultural development towards quantity and not quality, lack of a legal framework, and high investment costs for a system change along the value chain. On the consumers side, there is little willingness to pay more for organic products and little information provided in general. Farmers that are interested in changing to organic farming lack information and guidelines on how to produce, harvest, process, and organise logistics to ensure organic standard requirements. Moreover, those farmers who have changed from conventional to organic methods face challenges in the occurrence of diseases, yield loss and market access and given in an example on avocado. The Vietnamese Organic Farms project provides facilitation and consultancy for farmers, provides links to stakeholders along the values chain and develops communication platforms to raise awareness among stakeholders. The aim is to encourage the whole sector (like seeding and planting institutes, agriculture geography and techs, packaging, food processing, distributors, inspection, and logistics) to support a change to organic farming and sustainable land use. These platforms will gather and share information and guidelines, for a market place to connect rural e-commerce development, and for promoting organic agriculture to inbound and outbound. This will be a way to short cut those costs from farms to tables, and so help to provide consumers with a reasonable price and farmers with a sufficient income. Moreover, the additional values of organic agriculture related to ecosystem resilience under climate changes and sustainable development will be discussed.
Keywords: Organic agriculture, organic standards requirement, rural development, rural e-commerce, Vietnamese organic farms
Contact Address: Phuong Nguyen, Ideal Farm Corp, Hanoi, Vietnam, e-mail: phuong.emily1
gmail.com
