New standard set to broaden safe vegetable production for smallholders

The Plant Production and Protection Department (PPPD-MAE), in coordination with the Viet Nam Fruit and Vegetable Research Institute, convened a consultation workshop to gather feedback on a draft Vietnamese National Standard titled "Production and Primary Processing Procedures for Food-Safe Vegetables."

VietGAP has yet to reach the majority of farmers

Vegetables are an essential food group with a direct impact on public health. As consumers grow more attentive to quality, food safety, and traceability, the development of robust production standards is becoming increasingly important for Viet Nam's vegetable sector.

After more than 15 years of implementation, VietGAP has helped lay the groundwork for safe agricultural production, quality management, and traceability. In practice, however, its adoption rate remains modest. According to the PPPD, Viet Nam had approximately 1.15 million hectares under vegetable cultivation in 2025, yet only around 8,000 hectares held VietGAP certification, equivalent to roughly 0.5 to 0.6 percent of total production area.

The gap between technical requirements and practical implementation capacity remains wide, particularly for smallholder farmers, cooperatives, and small-scale production facilities. Compliance costs, record-keeping obligations, documentation management, assessment procedures, and the ongoing burden of maintaining certification continue to shut many farmers out of safe production standards.

Nguyen Quy Duong, Deputy Director of the PPPD, noted that the majority of vegetables consumed daily in Viet Nam still come from smallholder farms working plots of just a few hundred to a few thousand square meters. "What matters is building a set of standards that ensures food safety but is simpler and more accessible for vegetable production," Duong said.

A complement to VietGAP, not a replacement

According to the drafting committee, the new national standard is designed to establish a unified, clear, and practical set of technical guidelines better suited to Viet Nam's production conditions. The objectives are to help regulators improve the effectiveness of oversight, support enterprises and cooperatives in reducing compliance costs, and provide producers with concrete guidance for safer, more transparent production.

At the workshop, a recurring question among participants was whether the new standard would replace VietGAP. Duong clarified that numerous food safety standards are currently in use, including VietGAP, GlobalGAP, Rainforest Alliance, the 4C standard, and various national organic certification frameworks, each serving different market segments and requirements. Many domestic supermarket chains require VietGAP certification for products to be listed, while export markets such as the European Union and the United States operate under their own distinct frameworks.

"All standards ultimately pursue the same goal: food safety. Producers will choose whichever standard the market accepts," Duong said. The draft national standard is not intended to replace VietGAP or any existing framework. "This is not about replacing VietGAP. The new standard simply adds another option, one that allows a much larger group of farmers to access food-safe production through simpler, more workable means," he said.

A notable feature of the draft is its emphasis on streamlining procedures, reducing the documentation burden, and converting technical requirements into more readily understood practical guidance. The drafting committee is also exploring digital tools such as electronic farming logs on smartphones to ease the manual record-keeping burden on producers.

A standard built for reality, and for people

Dang Van Dong, Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the Viet Nam Fruit and Vegetable Research Institute, said the drafting process was grounded in four key foundations: legal basis, scientific basis, practical grounding, and a humanistic dimension.

The draft draws on and updates existing Vietnamese regulations while selectively incorporating elements from domestic and international standards, including VietGAP, AseanGAP, GlobalGAP, TCVN ISO 22000:2018, and traceability and food safety frameworks. Crucially, the drafting committee did not work solely from documents and desk research; it also conducted field surveys across multiple localities, meeting directly with farmers, cooperatives, and enterprises to understand the real difficulties they face in applying current standards.

Dang Van Dong identified the humanistic dimension as the most important aspect of the draft, noting that Viet Nam's vegetable sector still rests overwhelmingly on millions of smallholder farming households. "If we only build a standard suited to large enterprises or well-resourced cooperatives, we leave behind an enormous portion of the farming population. Many households grow only a few hundred square meters of vegetables and simply do not have the resources to navigate complex procedures or pay for certification. The new standard must be designed so that these producers can still apply it, still grow safe vegetables, and still participate in the market," he said.

Workshop participants also called for the standard to be accompanied by practical implementation tools, technical handbooks, standardized farming log templates, compliance assessment checklists, and traceability guidance. These were seen as essential conditions for ensuring that the standard, once adopted, translates into real on-farm practice rather than remaining a regulatory document on paper.

According to the drafting committee, all feedback gathered at the workshop will be consolidated, reviewed, and incorporated into a revised draft before submission to the relevant authorities for appraisal and official promulgation later in 2026. If enacted and effectively applied, the new standard is expected to help shift vegetable production toward a safer, more transparent, and more sustainable model, while opening a broader pathway for smallholder farmers to participate in certified safe-produce supply chains and meet the market's increasingly demanding requirements.

Dang Van Dong also observed that applying existing standards typically carries costs for certification, monitoring, and management system maintenance, while the resulting price premium for producers is often inadequate to justify the investment, a factor that has made many farming households hesitant to pursue quality certification in the first place.