Develop smart cooperative adaptive to climate change

Promoting IT application and digital transformation is the solution offered by the Vietnam Cooperative Alliance and Oxfam to overcome epidemics and climate change.

On the morning of October 15th, the Vietnam Cooperative Alliance (VCA) in collaboration with the Oxfam Organization in Vietnam, along with representatives of cooperative alliances in provinces and cities organized the Webinar "Developing smart, digitalized and climate-resilient agricultural cooperatives in Vietnam".

Making the opening speech, Dr. Pham Quang Tu, Deputy Director of Oxfam Vietnam, said that digital transformation is an inexorable development trend worldwide and in many different socio-economic fields.

"Digital transformation is of great significance, promotes the production of quality goods and opens up opportunities for enterprises and cooperatives to attain a fast and sustainable development, and contributes to helping Vietnam catch up with the development trend of countries in the region as well as the world," said Mr. Tu.

In Oxfam's group of solutions, the economic cooperative area is one at the center of attention. Oxfam’s aim is to find specific and timely solutions in order to assist cooperatives in implementing an effective digital transformation process, gradually helping cooperatives adapt to climate change and the era of information technology development 4.0.

Despite being a head-point direction, digital transformation in agricultural cooperatives in particular and the Vietnamese economy in general still faces many obstacles.

Mr. Tran Tuan Viet, Deputy Director of the VCA Center for Information and Communication assessed that the application of information technology (IT) and digital transformation in management, administration, and trade promotion has not met expectations.

"Although cooperative managers highly regard the importance of IT application and digital transformation, the actual application rate is only 1.98-2.82/5," Mr. Viet said.

Faced with the need to adapt to climate change, epidemics and many other factors such as technical barriers of countries around the world, Dr. Pham Quang Ha, Chairman of the Scientific Council, Vietnam Digital Agricultural Cooperative said that developing smart agricultural cooperatives is a mandatory requirement.

Mr. Ha emphasized: "We need to change the principles of agriculture, from exploiting to maintaining, fostering, restoring, and at the same time using system interactions, ensuring the diversity of components."

Mr. Ha also gave some suggestions considering the development of smart cooperatives such as forming professionalism in field activities based on high technology or building product supply consumption chains through a product introduction system.

One of the few successful models of smart cooperatives was presented by Mr. Dang Van Chinh, Director of Hue IT Cooperative (HueTechCo.op). Mr. Chinh shared his experience which is to integrate as much as possible production and business activities in both agriculture and public investment into the information portal. This is the basis for businesses and people to trace, monitor, manage, and conduct business activities in order to proactively adapt to changes.

Following Mr. Chinh's comments, Ms. Nguyen Thi Thanh Thuc, Member of the Executive Committee of the Vietnam Digital Agriculture Association (VIDA) also introduced smart agricultural solutions based on Auto Agri technology.

Some of Auto Agri's features introduced by Ms. Thuc included digitizing data for each member household of the cooperative, making an asset book of a member household, making an electronic diary, decentralizing supervision. Each member household can establish its own information and legal transparency, set up a book to monitor crops and livestock, create statistics and reports on land use, and open product pages.

Concluding the conference, Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Bao, Chairman of the Vietnam Cooperative Alliance, expressed his gratitude towards the valuable comments from participating units. On behalf of the Standing Committee of the Vietnam Cooperative Alliance, Mr. Bao asked that Oxfam continue to accompany the Vietnam Cooperative Alliance in the future.

Mr. Bao also mentioned 3 directions of cooperation in the coming time:

Firstly, improve the quality of human resources in agricultural cooperatives as well as basic equipment infrastructure for digital transformation and IT application in agricultural cooperatives.

Secondly, use some digital transformation application platforms and establish cooperatives providing high-tech services in the field of agriculture.

Thirdly, design and construct a project on the application of IT and digital transformation in the Vietnamese cooperative sector to mobilize finance from international organizations and funds.