Food Security of the Poor at Household Level: Case of Thanh Son District

Food Security of the Poor at Household Level

Case of Thanh Son District

Dang Ngoc Quang, Rural Development Services Centre

April 27, 2007

1. Introduction

Vietnam is primarily a poor and rural country with 75% of population living in rural area. About 60% of GDP is made of agricultural products. Annual GDP per capita, although increasing but remaining low at about 600 USD in 2006. Poverty is a wide-spread among population, which grows at a high rate. In 2006, using the criteria of expenditure at USD1 per day per person, the poverty rate is approximately 24%. In mountainous areas, the poverty rate reaches up to 80%, and the “normal” rate of poverty is often 50%. In five communities of Thanh Son district in Phu Tho, a province in the North of Vietnam, the area where RDSC, poverty rate ranges from 50% to 70%.

In November 2006, the prime minister of Vietnam had requested to stop all rice export operations for food security reason. The rice disease caused by brown-hoppers was so wide-spread in the Mekong river delta that threatened food security in the country. This event has shown that although being a second world’s rice exporter, food security in Vietnam is being under a question.

This paper reviews RDSC's experience in assisting communities in Thanh Son District to improve their food security at household level using a community development approach, which the organisation developed and tested in middle of 1990s.

2. The community and agriculture extension system

In Thanh Son district where the Rural development Services Centre has been active since 2002, there is a three level of hierarchy: district, commune and village. The district is made of 24 communes which are inhabited mainly by the Muong indigenous people, who make up some 80% of the population.

2.1. Government and extension service

The government has three departments in the district, which are responsible for the development in the area. The Economic Development Department is responsible for planning, budgeting for all economic development in the area, including agriculture. The Veterinary Department, staffed with three college or university educated officers, is responsible for veterinary services and animal disease control. The Agriculture Extension Centre is responsible for various experimentation of farming techniques, and their promotion among the villagers. These departments are partners for a programme funded by the WB in the district that assist villagers in agriculture development (with a top-down approach, and targeting the middle and better-off villagers.

Each commune, a formal and lowest level administrative unit, consists of some ten villages. A village is an settlement, where people from several clans or lineages live together. In a commune, the government maintains a groups of 15-17 officers, of whom one is responsible for agricultural extension. Some private veterinary practitioners could be found in one commune who offer veterinary services to villagers. These practitioners may have two or three year of professional veterinary education. In a village, the village chief, very often- a middle-aged man, functions as a facilitator for the district agriculture extension services.

2.2. Rural finance service

By the year 2007, in every commune, the government banks, the Agricultural and Rural Development Bank and Social Policy Bank are active. The former bank offer collateral-based credit at the market rate (1.25% per month) to all population for a term up to three years. The latter offer 12-month collateral free loans to the low income families at a subsidised interest rate (0.4% per month) with guarantee to be made by a village-based mass organisation, such as the Women’s Union or Farmer’s Union. The loan made by the former bank can be as large as USD 1500, compared to the latter’s USD 300. These banks are helpful source for financing for income generation opportunities in villages. Often, these government banks assist better the wealthy villagers, who have collaterals, and who commonly use their local power to access the subsidised loans, leaving the poor and women at the margin.

2.3. Ethnicity and population

In Vietnam, the Muong is the second largest ethnic group to the Kinh- the major ethinic group in the country, but its total population is about one million (Nguyen Van Huy, 1997). In the district, there are two other indigenous groups, namely Dzao and H’Mong, who migrated to this district for more then 30 years. The latter live in higher altitude compared to the Muong and Kinh, who came earlier and possess now low land or hill-foot land that is of better quality.

The general education level among the farmers is limited. For an adult, the average schooling period for a man is typically tens years, and five years for women against the 12 years basic education. For ethnic minority women, it is quite common to meet an illiterate, or women who fell back to illiteracy because of its limited use.

The population growth in the area is quite high, although is has been reduced by efforts of long-term population control programme from an annual rate 2.3% by 1995 to 1.8% by 2006. Typically, the average family size is 5.5, and in the area, the extended family is quite common.

3. Farming system in our community

3.1. Land and tenure

Geographically, the area is made of three part. The settlement area, which is located often in low hills with ferrolite soil. The houses, which used to be build on woods and on wooden poles with roof covered with palm leaves, now are replaced by brick-houses with red tiles on the roof.

The houses area surrounded by small garden where people plant vegetables, like morning glories, cabbage, sweet potatoes, tomatoes etc for home consumption. Near the main house and often attached to the kitchen are animal production at household scale, where a family keeps two or three pigs, some dozens of chicken, few goads, and two or three cattle or buffaloes (if they are wealthy).

The farming area in our communities are small valleys which run from the hill foots, where often a stream or spring comes out with water for irrigation. The valley has soil accumulated from hill run-off and is fertile but acidic. Villagers often use lime to neutralise the acidity.

For about 30 years since 1960 until 1990, the villagers used to farm together in a so called co-operative system. In this system, arable land was put together, and farming was done collectively. The outputs was shared according to the numbers of work days, after subtraction for taxes and common expenses, like water, fertiliser, seeds, and social costs, like daycare and communal health post.

After land reform in the mid-1990s, the collective farming system was collapsed. Every family was allotted a piece of land per head for 20-year land use, and the farmers are responsible for their production and distribution. But land is so little as each person has some 300 Sqm for wet-rice farming, totaling some 1500 Sqm for one family. This is quite a contrast to a large holding faming system in Europe or US, where a farm size is often 100 times larger.

3.2. Crop farming system

The cropping system is primarily wet-rice. The climatic condition, specifically the sunshine and rain fall in the area is favourable for two rice crops that takes three in Spring-Summer period and four months in Autumn -Winter period correspondingly. In winter, when it is relatively dry, the villagers manage to do a third crop in a period of three months, where they grow maize or legume or vegetable as cash crops, for examples green beans, black beans, cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes.

Surrounding the rice valleys, there are low hills, where there used to be rainforest 50 years ago. Nowadays, this area is the land used to plant eucalyptus or acacias for paper mills; this is an additional source of income for villagers. The villagers harvest their trees every eight or ten years. These trees are good for bees and some farmers keeps bee-hives at a small scale to produce honey, which is at very high demand at the local market. Some hilly land is used as pasture for cattle or goats.

3.3. Animal production

The small-holder animal production system functions to provide protein for the families, and to generate cash for buying food, when the rice or other stable crop is not sufficient for home consumption. The family fetch water from open wells for human use and for feeding the animal as well as for watering their vegetable.

Often the poor families do not have cash to buy seedling animals like pigs. Also, they have limited experience an skills to diagnose and treat animal disease. As a results the rate of lost of animals because of epidemic is very high. For pigs the rate is often 20% of total seed animals, and for cattle it can be 15%. For the poor, their pigs barns are often empty until the new harvest, and they do not have ruminant animals.

Animal and housing are very important criteria for wealth in our local community. Often, when doing wealth ranking, villagers often refer to poverty as a family with our pigs and cattle with poor housing condition.

3.4. Household food security

Although the current farming system is intensive with high yield rice seed varieties used, and chemical fertisers used, and three crop rotation system applied, the output from this land-scare system is hardly sufficient for human consumption and feeding animals (RDSC, Thanh Thuy and Thanh Son Household Survey Report, 2007). The poor families, 50% of the population, keep reporting about up to 6 months food insufficiency. The villagers in this group are more vulnerable to crop and animal diseases. They have almost no animal for sale, except few poultry. They have less cash available at hand for purchasing seeds and fertilisers timely. And lastly, they have more children to feed. Their coping strategy is to send a main bread-earner to migrate to urban centres for wage labour, selling small animals, or get into the vicious cycle of high-interest indebtedness.

The wealthy families are much more secured in term of food security. They never report about food shortage. They have more land, better access to seeds and fertiliser, more animals, and as a result they produce more food than they need for people and animals. Additionally, they have regular cash income from salaried jobs or non-farm income generation activities. These families often send young adults to cities for education or overseas export labour. And these young people send their money back to support their families.

4. Current intervention and impact

After 5 years working in three communes (Phuong Mao, Yen Mao and Tu Vu) in Thanh Thuy district of Phu Tho province, RDSC has successful developed and tested rural development models for supporting the poor and women in improving their food security. Since 1998, this approach has been practiced in Quang Ninh district, Quang Binh province. Further, since 2002, the approached was refined and has been replicated in five communes in Thanh Son district of Phu Tho province.

4.1. Programme approach

An approach in this programme is to build up assets of the poor and women, particularly the social assets, and strengthen their delivery mechanism and mechanism for achieving improvement in livelihood outcome, such as food security and empowerment. Central to this approach is to develop local social and technical resources for agriculture inputs, which are accessible for the poor and developing local technologies for the poor, to access better the existing resources for agriculture. Social resource for the poor and women are community based organizations, that they manage and control.

4.2. Food crop promotion

High yield rice seed producer groups are formed in two communes to make quality rice seeds available for the poor farmers. They can get rice seeds in advance and repay at the harvest time, or they can exchange food quality paddy for seeds. The rice seeds producers train their fellows with integrated pest controls, fertilising and water control techniques. That help their crops be more productive.

4.3. Animal production in focus

RDSC has animal development in its programme focus for identified advantages of this sector. Market study in animal production conducted by RDSC shows the fact that animal production in the area has more return rate. Furthermore, animal production is much less sensitive to ups- and downs of the climatic or weather changes, and pests.

Two piglets producers groups are created with key women-farmers who produce quality hybrid piglets for their neighbours in two communes. These women were assisted with feeding, caring skills, pigpen hygiene, loan for sows, and vaccinations. The produced piglets of high quality are sold at very high demand in villages. Indigenous knowledge is promoted for feeding, caring and disease prevention and treatment for saws and piglets among the women to reduce production costs.

In three communes of Thanh Son, RDSC organised various animal banks for instance goats, rabbits, cattle, which assist the poor families with breeding animals. These animals are selected because of the high demand in both local and national market, availability of animal food, which is not competing with human needs for food. The farmers from the poor families are assisted with rearing techniques, simple but effective animal barns with appropriate technologies, and animal-food fodders crops.

In every commune the community is supported to develop their network of paravets, who are assisted in improving their diagnostic and treatment skills as well as law on veterinary services. The network is helped to develop their medicine store and a fridge for vaccine. With the quality of the service and its coverage improved, the veterinary networks help communities to reduce their loss rate for pigs from 20% to 5% a year. Some networks successfully started their micro-insurance schemes for animals.

4.5. Microfinance service for poor women

In every project commune, in partnership with commune women’s unions, RSCD promoted and support formation of the women’s micro finance co-operatives.

The women’s micro-finance co-operatives are owned by poor members, who have made their equity share by 10 installments of about USD7 each. The loans ranges from US 20 to 150 to meet the women’s need for agricultural inputs, such as fertilizers, seed animals (some 80% of loan use) or start-up fund for their micro-businesses. The repayment is scheduled monthly for women to be able to generate some income to pay in 10 installments after a grace period of two months.

To help the co-operative to be sustainable, the loans are made at the market interest rate of 1.2% per month, which is to cover the administration costs, fund mobilization, and bad loans if any.

As the scheme is designed with a best fit for rural women in regards to its ownership and delivery mechanism, the performance of the loans are very high. All schemes reported about 100% repayment rate for both principals and interest. The same is true for the women’s membership.

Recent documentation by RDSC showed that with a relatively small resource, which is of about one tenth of a formal bank, a women’s micro-finance co-operative can have the same coverage for communities, but reaching effective the poor and women. Not only serving women with the micro-finance support, this institution functions also as a forum for women to meet and exchange local information, their experiences and offering one to another social support.

4.5. Village infrastructure

Village infrastructure is an important part of RDSC financial support to community efforts for improving their livelihood. This infrastructure often includes water management and village transport schemes, such in-the-field irrigation, sluice, roads and bridges.

Key to this support is the ownership of the technical design, maintenance, and also fund mobilization. Often, village develop local management committees to raise fund, monitor and supervise the micro-project implementation, and maintaining the constructions. The fund raised by the communities often match-up 50% of the project costs. Communities show that they can agree to make exemptions for the poor villagers from fund-raising campaigns. A local fee-based schemes are commonly agreed by the villagers to raise fund for maintaining the schemes.

The irrigation schemes often increase the effectiveness of land and water use. Many schemes reported about an increase of arable land area, which allow addition rice and auxiliary crops (maize, legume, vegetable). Furthermore, the better water supply assists villagers to increase their rice outputs by up to 40%. Both outcomes (more crops and higher productivity) contribute to improving availability of food or its security.

4.6. Innovation encouragement

The communities are assisted in forming group of farmers-innovators. These farmers are encouraged to experiment with high added-value crops and animals and farming techniques. Example of high value local-origin crops include perfume banana, special taros, and high protein rice. Some example of breeding animals are fresh-water fish, soft-shell turtle, frogs and bees. Local innovators are trained training for trainers, and facilitation skills to disseminate their learning to others. With a careful design, technical support and monitoring and evaluation, the programme expects to gain and share the knowledge widely among the community members.

5. Conclusion

The data from the comparative surveys at the start and by late 2006 has shown positive impact of RDSC programme on improving food security for the poor (RDSC, 2007). Majority of the poor families reported about reducing their food shortage from six month to three or two months. Majority of the poor show a big shift in their strategy for coping with the food shortage by selling instead of going into indebtedness or reducing the quality and quantity of their food. The data from RDSC survey also show that the poor refer more to the wage-labour as an important source of cash. These cash income opportunities may be created by the bank loans to the wealthy, who have been created job for the poor.

Literature

Nguyen Van Huy, Buc tranh Van hoa Cac dan toc Vietnam. Publishing house Van hoa Dan toc, Hanoi, 1997. (Vietnamese).

RDSC. Comparative Thanh Thuy and Thanh Son Household Survey 2004-2006 . Hanoi, 2007. (Vietnamese).

RDSC. Phu Tho Programme Annual Report. Hanoi, March 2007.

RDSC. Rural and Agriculture Extension with the Poor. Workshop Proceeding. Phu Tho, Jan 2007. (Vietnamese).

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