In Viet Nam food safety is among the top concerns of the public. The increasing incidents of food contamination, food poisoning, and foodborne illness steal the trust of consumers in the quality of the food they eat every day, making all actors in the value chain mistrust one another and driving smallholders into trouble.

To improve the situation, the Belgium Embassy in Viet Nam, Hanoi University for Public Health (HUPH), the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) teamed up together at Hanoi University of Public Health campus to co-host the workshop on ‘Scaling up the trust networks for food safety with small farmers’ on 4 July 2017.

The workshop cultivates food safety knowledge and explore existing and potential supports for safe food supply networks to empower smallholders in the face of losing trust from consumers.
80 participants from state agencies, research academia, universities, food safety inter-agencies, international organizations, donors, agriculture producers, retailers, consumers and the media sat together to seek to foster trust among relevant stakeholders.

In her opening remark, Bui Thi Thu Ha, rector of HUPH commented that within the trend of globalization, smallholders are facing quite many difficulties and challenges in the competition of production to ensure the quality of products to meet the increasingly stringent standards.

Nguyen Trung Kien from the Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agricultural and Rural Development elaborated that consumers, especially the emerging middle class tend to shift their shopping habits from traditional wet market to supermarkets and utility shops as they may think that food of the supermarket is safer and of better quality than the food produced by smallholders and sold in the traditional market. In fact, the number of supermarkets in Viet Nam has been mushrooming over the past 10 years from 47 in 2007 to 1035 in 2017.

Moreover, smallholders also have difficulties in accessing inputs as feeding companies prefer to provide inputs for large-scale farms. The limited access to information technology also hinders them from reaching market information.
Vo Thanh Son, senior rural development expert of the World Bank said while small-scale farmers are increasingly required to obtain quality assurance to sell their products to more demanding customers, agriculture standards are often designed for big production which is of high cost and complex for application, not targeting at smallholders.

At the workshop, representatives at the grassroots level showcased some good models which can support enhance the trust of consumers in smallholders ’products, for example, the participatory guarantee system for safe vegetables production (PGS). PGS is a quality control system developed by International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM). It involves all stakeholders, particularly producers and consumers. While VietGAP is very comprehensive but inaccessible to smallholders because of high cost and complexity, PGS is affordable and applicable for smallholders and reliable for consumers. TraceVerified is another model which is feasible and affordable and can help smallholders to increase trust of consumers in which smallholders pay around 20 US dollar per month to have their product traceability.

Hung Nguyen, regional representative of ILRI East and Southeast Asia stressed that further studies should be carried out to answer the question if Viet Nam should follow suit developed countries on the path of developing supermarkets and gradually abolishing the traditional market model, or it should strengthen the small holders and traditional markets while moving forward with supermarketization and large scale production.

In her closing remark, Ambassador of Belgium Embassy, Jehanne Roccas said ‘this workshop is a building block to move from the current situation, with wonder food, and urgent food safety problems, food scares and suspicion, towards a situation preserving the unique diversity of production and consumption, but with trusted safe food.’

The workshop was made possible through the close partnership efforts and initiatives of the Viet Nam Food Safety Working Group, which includes representatives from the Belgium Embassy in Viet Nam, the Canadian Embassy in Viet Nam, the Australian Government, FAO, HUPH, ILRI, the World Bank, among other partners. This workshop topic was based on the recommendation from the report "Viet Nam food safety risks management : challenges and opportunities" by the World Bank and its partners launched earlier this year.