Public-Private Partnership (PPP) to support the development of potato sector in Vietnam

The Netherlands’ Vice Minister of Agriculture and Bac Ninh province’s agriculture unit have a recently visited the project “Support and develop the potato sector in Vietnam” in Dong Xuyen commune, Tu Son district, Bac Ninh province on the occasion of harvesting potato and given training certificate for farmers participated in the project.

“Support and develop the potato sector in Vietnam” is a PPP project that has been being implemented for 5 years (2014-2019) with the cooperation of Ministry of Foreign Affair of the Netherlands, Fresh Studio, Agrico, PepsiCo Vietnam and Dutch Wageningen University.

With the purpose of creating sustainable value chain for high quality potatoes in Vietnam, the project has been being implementedfor 2 years and already attained significant achievements. This harvest event is a result of the experimental production of the two Dutch varieties of potato – Markies and Rosagold – before mass production.

The project uses chain value approach and includes 4 main practices:supply, demand, chain value development and policy campaign. On the supply side, the project focuses on experimenting high productivity varieties, training farmers and consulting technology. After twoyears, fivehigh quality potato varieties have been selected to enter the market of Vietnam, 14 production consulting specialists and 950 farmers (70% female) have been trained in producing potatoes.

Additionally, the project has connected farmers and traders for field trip activities as well as agreements of producing and selling potatoes (conducted over 350 contracts) in order to create market connection for potatoes; many campaigns to raise consumers’ awareness of potatoes have also been carried out and approached over 200.000 consumers in urban areas in Hanoi and Hochiminh City. Moreover, the policies on potato sectorhas been formed with periodic policy meeting and conference.

With the smart approach and the positive partners, a persistent potato production system will have been established for the potato sector in Vietnam by the end of this project. As the result, Vietnamese potatoes are able to compete with imported onesand meet the demand of the domestic market effectively.