Participating organizations

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Context
The Mekong River Delta, located at Vietnam’s southern tip, is one of the world’s most fertile regions. It covers about 4 million hectares, with freshwater habitats ranging from floodplains, wetlands and mangrove forests, to mudflats, sea grasses, riparian vegetation, paddy land and peatlands. The landscape, often referred to as Vietnam’s “rice basket”, produces over 55% of the country’s annual rice crop and 95% of its rice exports. This production system supports around 1.5 million small-scale rice farmers and is a major factor in local culture, traditions and livelihoods. Its low-lying coastal geography puts the Mekong River Delta and its inhabitants among the world’s most vulnerable to the impacts of climate risk.1 In a region that depends on small-scale agricultural production, this can be devastating to the economy and significantly impact farmers’ livelihoods.
hectares is the area of the Mekong River Delta
of the country’s annual rice crop is produced by the Mekong River Delta
of its rice exports are from the Mekong River Delta
rice farmers are supported by this production system
Key facts
Ambition
The Australian Government-funded Transforming Rice Value Chains in the Mekong River Delta (TRVC) program aims to improve the quality of Vietnamese rice while promoting the social inclusion of smallholder farmers and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. TRVC incentivizes collective action among some of the landscape’s largest rice exporters through a pay-for-results scheme. TRVC incentivizes off-takers to work with cooperatives and farmers on sustainable production practices by awarding monetary prizes based on GHG reductions achieved. In doing so, TRVC spurs the private sector to invest in strengthening relationships with farmers to increase sustainable production, access higher-value markets and help transition the Mekong River Delta to a climate-resilient, sustainable rice landscape. TRVC will phase out the pay-for-results scheme over time, once the sustainable practices it has incentivized take hold and they realize the economic benefits. The project aims to see a reduction of 200,000 metric tons of CO2e by 2027.
The Netherlands Development Organisation (SNV) coordinates the TRVC, with the strategic support of an Advisory Board led by Deloitte Consulting LLP and including the Government of Australia, the Government of Vietnam, the Vietnam Rice Industry Association (VIETRISA) and local experts.
The project aims to see a reduction of
metric tons of CO2e by 2027
The program at a glance
As the project lead, SNV directly engages rice producing companies that, in turn, lead the work of enrolling farmers – either directly or, more commonly, through cooperatives – into the program and engaging them in the adoption of improved sustainable farming practices. Based on the results achieved, rice companies receive monetary prizes at the conclusion of each growing season.
Smallholder farmers are the most critical actors in the success of the program and its ultimate beneficiary. Farmers receive incentives to participate as they obtain higher prices for the more sustainably produced rice, commanded either by export markets or by domestic premium markets. Premiums differ from producer to producer, in the range VND 100–1,300 per kilogram. In 2025, for the first time, some of the rice producers participating in the TRVC program have sold their rice under the new Green and Low-Emission Vietnam Rice trademark launched by the Vietnam Rice Industry Association (VIETRISA).
The practices associated with reducing emissions also reduce input intensity, lowering production costs and increasing overall profit for farmers by 40–70% to date. Finally, in addition to the overall increase in profit from higher prices and lower costs, farmers also receive a share of the prize awarded to companies, depending on each company’s individual arrangement with supply chain actors.
The program doesn’t prescribe which practices farmers need to adopt, which allows businesses and growers to determine the practices that are the most suitable and beneficial for them. The practices adopted, however, must correlate with greenhouse gas emissions reductions, such as improved water management or alternate wetting and drying, fertilizer rate reduction or substitution, residue removal, direct seeding and reduced planting density. Agritech company Regrow Ag carries out the monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) by quantifying GHG emissions and analyzing them for each season, with a comparison between baseline emissions and program emissions by field.
The practices associated with reducing emissions also reduce input intensity, lowering production costs and increasing overall profit for farmers by
-
to date
An enabling policy environment
The Government of Vietnam has included rice production as a lever for emissions reduction in its nationally determined contribution (NDC), identifying that the transformation of the rice value chain into a high-quality and low-carbon production system both enhances the sector’s sustainability and business competitiveness and helps achieve its national climate goals. Announced at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai in 2023, the One Million Hectares program targets high quality and low-carbon rice in the Mekong Delta from 2024 through 2030. It specifically aims to encourage the adoption of sustainable rice farming practices in the region.
In this context, the Government of Vietnam has promoted methods to improve the sustainability of rice production, including the One Must Do, Five Reductions policy. Developed by the International Rice Research Institute, this principle encourages rice growers to use certified seeds – the “1 must-do” – to achieve “5 reductions” – seed rate, fertilizer rate, pesticide rate, water consumption and post-harvest losses.
The national government, however, has mostly relied on farmer extension services to encourage sustainable rice production methods, without engaging the private sector. The TRVC program complements existing public policies by leveraging rice-producing businesses to support the overall public strategy for rice value chain decarbonization.
Promoting social inclusion
To promote social inclusion, TRVC requires businesses to meet established gender equality, disability and social inclusion criteria to access the program. Examples of the criteria include companies conducting gender analysis in their value chains, a minimum of 30% of farmers who are women actively participating in training and with access to the resources provided by each company, and having a disability policy in place. The criteria become more stringent over time, requiring businesses to progressively include more vulnerable populations. Through the collection of these criteria, the program promotes a holistic approach to sustainable development that leverages climate-focused programs to generate social inclusion co-benefits.

Credits: SNV
Financing model
The Government of Australia funds TRVC, providing a grant totaling AUD $17 million, covering project operations and the pay-for-results scheme through 2027.
The project awards prizes to participating companies based on verified GHG reductions on-farm. Each company receives prizes proportionally from a shared pool according to the GHG reduction results monitored during each season. In the first season, the shared pool was AUD $200,000 and will increase to AUD $550,000 in the sixth and final season (2027). The increase over time aims to encourage competition and scale across participating companies. To further encourage scaling over time, the project also awards grand prizes of up to AUD $900,000– split among up to five winners and awarded at the end of the sixth season – to the companies that are most successful in reducing emissions across the six seasons (among the eight Vietnamese rice-producing companies currently part of the project).
Of the AUD $200,000 awarded to rice producing companies in the first season, the participating companies shared between 15% and 95% of their monetary awards (for a total of approximately AUD $86,000) with their partner farmers and cooperatives. While prize-sharing can prove to be an additional reward and income source for the farmers, the project’s main benefits for growers derive from the reduction of input costs and the receipt of price premiums for the quality of their product.
The project aims to become self-sustaining by initially incentivizing farmers and the private sector to adopt the model. Once the lower cost and sustainable practices it incentivizes take hold and they have fully realized the economic benefits, TRVC will phase out the pay-for-results scheme. This model builds on the work carried out by the SNV-implemented AgResults initiative in the Red River Delta in 2017–2020. This initiative showed the successful adoption and mainstreaming of sustainable practices and that they persisted after the end of the financial incentives. Two years after the project’s conclusion, evaluators found that, in the context of a largely favorable enabling environment, the private sector has continued to promote and use the technology packages developed under AgResults. The overall scale of adoption had grown, with 2.7 times more hectares under cultivation using the technology packages than at the end of AgResults.
To continue to spur greater scale and adoption in the longer term, TRVC plans to monetize GHG emissions reductions through carbon credits and is already working on feasibility to establish and register a carbon project.
Monitoring, reporting and verification
Agritech company Regrow Ag developed the monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) system, designing it from the beginning to align with standards for both voluntary carbon markets (Verra VM0042/VM0051) and for insetting purposes (SustainCERT).
The system quantifies the greenhouse gas emissions at the field level, per season, using the DeNitrification-DeComposition (DNDC) model developed by Regrow Ag. This provides estimates of the carbon, nitrous oxide and methane emissions derived from agricultural management practices. It quantifies GHG emissions through comparison between baseline emissions and program emissions by field. The baseline management practices come from peer-reviewed literature, surveys and expert interviews. The system quantifies program emissions based on primary data collected by farmers.
The MRV system also incorporates remote sensing technology to assess compliance with approved on-farm practices, for instance by estimating the total days farmers flood or drain each field to attest to practices such as alternate wetting and drying.
Table 2: Objectives and progress monitored per impact area

Endnotes
1 WBCSD (2023). Roadmap to Nature Positive: Foundations for the agri-food system. Row crop commodities subsector → Deep dive: Rice production in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Retrieved from: https://www.wbcsd.org/resources/roadmap-to-nature-positive-foundations-for-the-agri-food-system-landscape-deep-dives/