Scott Newman, FAO Viet Nam’s former Senior Technical Coordinator of the Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD), received a “Medal for the Agriculture and Rural Development Cause” from the Department of Livestock Production within the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (DLP-MARD). With the ceremony taking place at the Department of Livestock Production, Scott Newman was honoured in recognition of his remarkable contributions to safe and healthy livestock production systems, biosecurity improvements, disease prevention, surveillance which resulted in zoonotic disease transmission risk reduction at the source of infection.

For the Department of Livestock Production, Scott Newman major achievements include supporting programmes to strengthen safe animal production practices and create national standards including biosecurity and production requirements, mainly in small and middle scale farms where farmers lack technical capacity, biosecurity standards, and guidelines.  Scott helped guide and develop methodologies to profile production systems and characterize cross-border and national chicken and free-grazing duck value chain and marketing systems including day-old chicks and eggs which is now closely linked to ongoing surveillance and early warning disease detection programs.

Scott worked with a multi-disciplinary team to develop a risk management strategy to control trans-boundary spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza between Vietnam and China, and between Vietnam and Cambodia and facilitated inter-governmental meetings to agree on multilateral implementation of action plans.

Moreover, Scott helped strengthened multiple elements of the Vietnam government’s livestock restructuring plan improving public-private partnership strategies for safe food animal production and marketing which allows Viet Nam to demonstrate leadership in the region in the livestock development sector.

 “It is a great honour to receive this award from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the government of Viet Nam. I hope that my small contribution to their progress has contributed to sustainable agricultural development and will support providing safe, disease-free food to the people of Viet Nam.  As Viet Nam is an up and coming country, I look forward to hearing about positive future success stories and I am confident that the country will continue to make improvements to livestock development sector and zoonotic disease prevention and control.” said Scott Newman.

FAO ECTAD Viet Nam continues to support the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development through the USAID-funded Emerging Pandemic Threats 2 program and UN Joint Programmes. This work will further mitigate the risk of disease transmission between livestock, wildlife and people. ECTAD also contributes further to One Health, the safe and effective use of antimicrobials and antibiotics in livestock production, and food safety in conjunction with the government of Viet Nam priorities.