Viet Nam Farmers’ Union (VNFU) was established in 1930. Its position is recognized in the Constitution of Vietnam 2013 and is recognized as playing a key and central role for farmer movements and new rural construction. It is organized at 4 official levels: national, provincial, district and commune level. Under the commune level, VNFU is organized into branches and under the branches, VNFU is organized into groups. At present, VNFU has over 10.5 million members working in various sectors such as agriculture, forestry, fishery, salt-making, handicraft and small industry, services. For the last years, VNFU has tried to implement many various activities to provide services for farmers and support farmers to work together through collective economic forms (cefs) such as Coops, CGs. In May, 2015, the Prime Minister agreed to support VNFU in developing collective economic models and to support VNFU to mobilize other financial resources to implement this program. The prime minister also agreed that VNFU is an actor in the national trade promotion program. This is an important legal basis for VNFU to implement their task. VNFU developed the proposal on “Enhancing participation of cooperatives and other collective economic forms in markets and value chains”. VNFU would like to request Agriterra for its supporting to implement this proposal.

Goals

-Raise awareness, interests of farmers, various stakeholders on necessit yto develop cooperative models
-Improve capacity of cooperatives in business development, financial management and governance.
-Improve supporting capacity of VNFU staff to support the development of cooperative models