The Korea Partnership for Water and Food (KPWF) has allocated a $1.5 million grant to support Viet Nam's low-carbon and green agriculture transformation. The initiative, titled "Viet Nam: Facilitating Low-carbon and Green Agriculture Transformation," aims to provide policy and advisory services essential for the country's green transformation efforts.
Guo Li, Senior Agriculture Economist with the Agriculture Global Practice in Southeast Asia, leads the project. He highlighted that Viet Nam's National Green Growth Strategy from 2021-2030 underpins the program. This strategy focuses on increasing farmers' income, ensuring food security, developing sustainable agriculture, restoring ecosystems, enhancing biodiversity, promoting market linkages, and accelerating rural development.
Significant progress has been made towards achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. A notable milestone was reached with the approval of the "One Million-hectare High-quality Low-carbon Rice Program" in late 2023 at COP28 in Dubai. The government is also exploring carbon financing solutions through a transaction with the World Bank’s Transformative Carbon Asset Facility (TCAF).
The KPWF grant comprises three components: technical assistance for a national low-carbon agriculture transition strategy; analytical work focused on rice sector execution; and information campaigns disseminating outcomes from studies and policy research.
The Korea Rural Economic Institute (KREI) and Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) are key partners in this initiative. KREI contributes by introducing Korean best practices tailored to Viet Nam’s context, while GGGI develops an ASEAN-wide methane reduction project benefiting Viet Nam.
Li confirmed that the grant supports larger World Bank lending programs like the IBRD loan proposal and TCAF project for Viet Nam's 1MHa program. It finances technical assistance activities that inform IBRD project design while supporting monitoring systems development.
Future steps include advancing IBRD loan preparation, implementing the 1MHa program, scaling up capacity-building efforts for stakeholders, refining methodologies for carbon finance readiness, promoting low-carbon rice products branding, seeking additional grants for non-construction activities of IBRD projects such as technology transfer and strengthening partnerships to achieve green transformation targets.