Khanh Thanh Cooperative grows clean, organic vegetables and fruits, providing a large number of agricultural products to provinces and cities across the north of Vietnam. Due to the breakout of COVID-19, the cooperative faced plenty of difficulties including broken supply chain and congestion of agricultural products. For producers of fresh fruits and vegetables which has a short shelf life, the burden is doubled. Farmers faced difficulties in selling their farm products and as consequence, they lacked working capital for the next cropping.
Thanks to the ARISE-Farmers project, the Khanh Thanh Cooperative was able to get a loan of VND 3.45 million per farmer household for the period of 5 months. The cooperative got the most out of the loan–contributing all funds to purchase seeds and fertilizers to save maximum cost for farmers.
On behalf of the farmers, the cooperative was in charge of managing the capital, purchasing farm inputs in large quantities, and distributing these to the farmers. As a result, the members of the cooperative were able to get materials at the most reasonable prices. Farmers were able to share some of the burdens and the cooperative has partly restored production and better prepared the farmers for the upcoming cropping season. Although COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacted the lives of many people, the farmers also learned a lot of lessons from their experiences during this difficult time, including collective solidarity to overcome difficulties, which is very important.
Generally, most farmers’ organizations that accessed the ARISE project’s loans shared that ARISE capital with low interest rate or fee provided timely support especially when households were facing a lot of problems due to the pandemic and they hope to continue to receive support and meaningful capital sources like ARISE project to further help them and achieve economic development.
Despite the average amount of capital, the ARISE project’s revolving fund helped many farmer members to continue their production by increasing the source of fertilizers to invest in crop care. Therefore, the farmer members are more excited at the movement of production emulation to develop the household economy, overcoming a part of the difficulties affected by the pandemic. At the same time, ARISE fund has facilitated more trust-building among farmer members towards the Farmer’s Union at all levels. The support from this concessional loan has become a lever to help strengthen the resilience of smallholder farmers, ensure stability, and help farmers feel secure to maintain their production.
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