Vietnam Cooperative Development Project helps promote pomelo exports to Canada

On March 24, Socodevi Organization (Canada) and the School of Agriculture and Rural Development Managers II under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development held a workshop to review the Vietnam Cooperative Development Project (VCED) with the theme ‘7 years - a road to improve livelihoods for Vietnamese farmers’ to look back on the achievements as well as the difficulties that need to be improved in order to support the sustainable development of cooperatives in Vietnam.

Funded by Canada and jointly implemented by Socodevi Organization and the School of Management for Agriculture and Rural Development II, the project has helped improve cooperatives’ competitiveness through a variety of activities such as training for farmers, strengthening of governance, upgrades to equipment, marketing, branding, and others.

The project has deployed five new large-scale cooperatives including Ben Tre Green Green Pomelo Cooperative, Evergreen Ninh Thuan Grape Cooperative, Don Duong Dairy Cow Cooperative, Evergrowth Dairy Cow Cooperative, and Thanh Binh Co-operative’s dragon fruit. Of them, the Ben Tre Grapefruit Cooperatives, the Evergreen Ninh Thuan and the Thanh Binh Cooperatives were selected to participate in the Ministry of Planning and Investment’s Project 167 on ‘Selection, improvement and replication of effective new-style cooperative models in localities across the country in the period of 2021-2025’.

As a result, the cooperative is not only proactive in production and standards, but also proactive in terms of the market and is aiming for a circular economy - a systemic approach to economic development designed to benefit businesses, society, and the environment to ensure a closed production process that does not pollute the environment.

The project has succeeded in an effort to increase the competitiveness of these cooperatives in many aspects such as management capacity, brand building, domestic and foreign market development, factory construction, production equipment, meet international standards to progress towards completing the agricultural value chain.

Launched in 2015, VCED is a project funded by the Government of Canada through the Department of Foreign Affairs of Canada, which helps improve the livelihoods of men and women in an equitable and sustainable manner, through agricultural value chain development in the new model of cooperatives. The project has directly improved livelihoods of more than 8,000 households as well as provided training to more than 500 young people on cooperative model and entrepreneurship by this model. Moreover, 100 young staff were trained as being future leaders of cooperatives.

On the same day, the VCED project helped the cooperative to build a website https://htxbuoidasinhbentre.com to build and register for trademark protection "Pink grapefruit girl" for fresh pomelo products and fruit juice products. Thanks to the project, the Ben Tre Green Pomelo Cooperative’s pink lady pomelo have hit shelves at supermarkets and fruit shops and a juice company in Canada in August 2020.

The Socodevi organization has also guided and formed a sense of production in the direction of safety, being environmentally friendly, helping to reduce costs, increase the quality of green pomelos. More farmers registered to be members of the Ben Tre Green Grapefruit Cooperative over the years. The cooperative has also linked with a number of other agricultural cooperatives in using input services such as Chau Binh Agricultural Cooperative and Tan Thieng Ornamental Seedlings.

Since then, the Ben Tre Green Skin Grapefruit Cooperative has played an important role in orienting, supporting and leading other agricultural cooperatives in the province and the economic development of farmers, making an important contribution to creating the green skin pomelo brand. In addition, the cooperative invested in a juice processing factory, extracting essential oils from pomelos.