“One must do, five reductions” technical practice and the economic performance of rice smallholders in the Vietnamese Mekong delta

The “One Must Do, Five Reductions” (1M5R) program was certified in 2013, by Vietnam Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, as a national approach to promoting the best management practices in lowland rice cultivation. The main idea behind 1M5R is the use of good-quality/certified seeds (the One Must Do) as well as the reduction of seed rates, pesticide use, fertilizer inputs, water use, and postharvest losses (Five Reductions). However, the impact of these farming practices is not well understood. This study employs the propensity score matching (PSM) approach to investigate the factors that affect the adoption of the 1M5R practice and to estimate this technique's impact on the economic performance of rice cultivation. Primary data were collected through a household survey of 380 rice farms in four provinces in the Mekong Delta (MKD), Vietnam. The results indicate that adopting the 1M5R technique is significantly correlated with the educational level of household heads, their memberships in paddy cooperatives, and their attendance to previous training classes. Additionally, the 1M5R technical package helps farmers to reduce their production cost by 10%, increase a paddy's selling price by 4.5% per kg, and obtain 10% more profit, compared to traditional farming households. The return on investment for adopters increased by 22%. While the findings show that a sustainable farming technique is advantageous to local farmers, they fail to present any paddy yield increase in treatment fields. To scale up this program to other areas in the MKD, well-educated farmers who are still traditional producers/non-adopters should be positively invited for training classes of the program