2019 Volume 10 Issue 1 Pages 114-121
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the reduction in poverty and improvement of food security in ethnic minority areas can be realised by the diffusion of agricultural innovation with a social networking system, established through a case study of the Project on Food Security Improvement (PFSI) for Small Scale Farmers in Central Vietnam. The project had developed and expanded the PFSI model, which consists of three components of technical, network, and monitoring submodels. The model was promoted to distribute an innovative agricultural technique of the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method to local farmers, as well as strategic arrangements to identify talented key adopters, who are constructing effective networks among traditional minority group communities. The results of the project implementation revealed dramatic improvements in the capacity for food self-supply, by improving rice productivity with an average yield increase of 1.4 ton/ha, compared with the conventional method. Moreover, the arrangement of identifying key adopters and establishing a network system had led to further diffusion of innovation to the minority groups. The paper explains the importance of understanding the heterogeneous features of Vietnamese localities and ethnicities, pointing out how participation of minority groups can influence others in their community. The lesson learned from the case gives an important insight towards solving the issue of disparities between rural and urban, among regions, and between ethnic majorities and minorities in Vietnam, which may be hidden easily in the face of the country’s recent rapid economic growth and “average” improvement of the country’s social welfare.
