Collective Action for Safe Vegetable Production
The role of small farmers’ collective action for safe vegetable production in
I Rationale
Recent economic, political and demographic changes in Vietnam have led to a growing urban demand for quality vegetables. Due to the consumers’ considerable concern about vegetables safety (especially with regard to pesticide residues), the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture have been implementing since 1995 an ambitious program called “safe vegetables”. Certificates of production of safe vegetables were awarded to companies and cooperatives involved in the program and meeting the required standards. Ensuring vegetable safety has become key for public health and for competitiveness of farmers but small-scale farmers face several problems in meeting these standards and are at risk of exclusion from high-value markets. Collective action can be an institutional mechanism of overwhelming importance for linking smallholders to high value markets and for the emergence of a collective reputation based on aggregate quality. Collective reputation can be approached as a dynamic common property resource and thus it can be affected by free-riding behaviors by the members. The research considers two aspects of collective action: the collective activities supporting quality development (activities otherwise difficult or impossible to be carried out by an individual farmer) and the collective safety control (monitoring and sanctioning systems aiming at lessening opportunistic behaviors).
II Objectives
• Identifying factors important for achieving high level of food safety in vegetable production
• Assessing magnitude, relative contribution and direction of influence of different causal processes on collective action
• Examining the performance or the effectiveness of the collective actions established
• Increasing decision-makers awareness about the technical and institutional conditions contributing to (or hindering) safe vegetable production
• Developing specific tools for organizations involved in external controls for better selecting their targets
III Activities
• Literature review
• Survey of around 60 farmers’ groups for data collection in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City provinces
• Laboratory analysis on vegetable samples for detection of pesticide residues
• Data analysis and reporting
IV Expected results and products
• Increased research capacity of the partner institutions
• One or two papers published in peer-reviewed journals
• Report highlighting conditions facilitating safe vegetable production by small scale farmers’ groups including recommendations on policy required to enhance their safe vegetable production
• Report including recommendations to research centers, extension system, governmental inspectors and decision makers for identifying the most vulnerable groups in complying to the rules for safe vegetable production and to whom more technical assistance or monitoring activity should be addressed
Coordination
Jean-Marie Codron (INRA)
codron@supagro.inra.fr
Paule Moustier (CIRAD)
paule.moustier@cirad.fr
Diego Naziri
dnaziri@yahoo.it
Duration
December 2007-December 2009
Funding
• CIRAD
• INRA
Partners
• Vietnam: VAAS (FAVRI, CASRAD/FCRI); Nong Lam University, Ho Chi Minh City; Plant Protection Department in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City
• France: CIRAD and INRA
