Emerging Agro-food Markets, Supply Chains, and Regional Rural Development Prospects in Nghe An Province, Vietnam 1

Vietnam opened its doors to a more marketized economy in the late 1980s. Rural producers have, for the most part, gained from market integration, and rural poverty rates have more than halved. Yet as food supply chains become more concentrated, gaining access to suppliers and rapidly expanding supermarkets poses a key challenge for small producers. This paper examines the restructuring of agro-food markets in Vietnam and provides a case study from one of the country’s poorest regions: Nghe An province, in Vietnam’s north central coast. It outlines the opportunities and constraints for development of regionalized and local food systems. A survey of the origin of foodstuffs in the main wet market and supermarket in Vinh City, the provincial capital, revealed a high degree of local (provincial) sourcing of fresh and semi-processed produce in the wet market, but virtually no local sourcing of goods in the supermarket. The latter offers predominantly processed goods with trademarks from industrial zones near Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and a small but growing number of imported goods. Nghe An has little in the way of agro-industrial food processing. Given the rapid expansion of supermarkets around Vietnam, this does not bode well for the province’s rural and regional development prospects, nor for the sustainability of the food system more broadly