Establishment of Community-Based Dissemination Model and Its Effective Function for Sustainable Food Security and Poverty Reduction

Vietnam ranks as one of the largest rice exporters in the world. Two major deltas, the Mekong River Delta and the Red River Delta, contribute around 70% of the country’s rice production and 90% of its rice exports, while people in the mountainous areas of Central Vietnam still suffer from food shortage for three to four months per year. To combat this incongruous situation, the Foundation for International Development/Relief (FIDR), a Japan-based non-governmental organization (NGO), launched a project to introduce system of rice intensification (SRI) methods and developed the community-based dissemination (CBD) model. One of the difficulties that the government and aid agencies generally face is to create an effective and sustainable dissemination model, when the newly-introduced technology is totally unfamiliar to targeted region and residents. Vietnam consists of 54 ethnic groups, and 14% of the population is comprised of 53 ethnic minorities, mainly living in mountainous areas. Almost 50% of them still live below the poverty line and are threatened by food shortage. Within their cultural context, it is hard to adapt to the new concepts of farming, and they are not used to paddy rice cultivation yet. As the result of the project, the model successfully reduced the food shortage of 1.5 months less in average with more than 4,000 households involved. The model is now turned over to the local government as a case of sustainable management practices. This paper aimed to examine what made the model effectively function.