Word Bank urges Vietnam to adopt low-carbon rice to cut emissions

Transitioning to low-carbon rice production offers the highest potential for Vietnam to meet its goal of reducing methane emissions by 30% by 2030 while boosting the competitiveness of this significant export item, a new World Bank study says.

“Findings from this study show that the longer it takes to transition, the higher the costs will be,” states the September 2022 report, titled “Spearheading Vietnam’s Green Agricultural Transformation: Moving to Low-Carbon Rice”.

“Even though the transition cost is high, the net benefit is both positive and high in the medium to long term due to the benefits from increased agriculture productivity, sustainability, and competitiveness.

“Moreover, moving toward low-carbon rice can also help preserve Vietnam’s global export competitiveness as multinational companies and consumers in Vietnam’s main export destination markets increasingly start to demand compliance with sustainable production standards to avoid carbon leakage from other countries.”

The report highlights five short- to medium-term policy areas to accelerate the transition to low-carbon agriculture, including ensuring policy coherence and plan-budget alignment, repurposing policy tools and public expenditures, promoting public investments, strengthening institutions, and enabling the private sector and other stakeholders to participate.

“Vietnam’s agricultural sector is at an inflection point. It has supported both growth and poverty reduction, but there is now an urgent need to transform and adopt sustainable and low-carbon practices to maintain growth,” Carolyn Turk, World Bank country director for Vietnam, said during the launch of this report Saturday.

The introduction was part of the “Integrated Climate Resilience and Sustainable Development of the Mekong Delta” workshop, co-organized by the World Bank and Vietnam’s agriculture ministry in the Mekong Delta city of Can Tho.

At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) held in Glasgow, Vietnam made international commitments to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions toward net-zero levels by 2050.

Rice contributes about half of the Vietnamese agricultural sector’s GHG emissions. Another reason why the World Bank urged Vietnam to shift to low-carbon rice is the country’s competitiveness in agricultural exports may be negatively affected by heightened international attention to the carbon footprint of exported commodities, the 104-page study says.

The World Bank conducted the study because Vietnam is an agricultural commodity powerhouse and one of the world’s leading exporters of agricultural products, ranking among the top five global suppliers of fish, rice, coffee, tea, cashew nuts, black pepper, rubber, wood products, and cassava.

The nation earned total agricultural export revenues of over $48 billion in 2021. Vietnam currently ranks as the world’s first, second, and third largest exporter of cashews, coffee, and rice, respectively.

Rice is cultivated on over half of Vietnam's arable land, with up to 54.5% in the Mekong Delta region. Over 80% of the region’s population is engaged in rice cultivation, and nearly 55% of the delta’s land produces rice, with more than 1,600 rice varieties cultivated, according to the study.