Senior officials in the Lao government and concerned organizations and business enterprises are increasingly interested in policy formulation based on science and evidence-based research. Technical assistance and funding for policy research is increasingly linked to hard scientific evidence and demonstrated success in the belief that better policies will be formulated, and existing policy implementation gaps will be addressed. Decision-makers continue to seek solutions to persistent challenges to sustainable agricultural development that form the research agenda for the Policy Think Tank. These are: Agricultural technology issues, Farmer organization issues, Livestock technology and fishery issues, Agro-economic issues, Agrobiodiversity issues, Agricultural land issues, Forest management issues, and Nutrition agriculture sensitivity
The 2020 Supervision Mission to NARDT grant project was carried out successfully with support and cooperation of the Regional Coordination Board, IPSARD, CESD, NAFRI and CDRI during 24 November to 4 December 2020.
Hanoi, 10 - 11 December 2020. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), in cooperation with the the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Vietnam and International Agricultural Development Fund (IFAD), organized the ISG 2020 Plenary Meeting with the theme: "Viet Nam's agriculture and rural development in the context of COVID-19 impacts: Opportunities and challenges".
The purpose of this research brief is to synthesize the f ndings of ten policy research studies conducted by NAFRI’s Policy Think Tank (PTT) research team between 2016 and 2020, and complementary research studies. The research was related to commercialisation of agricultural products in Lao PDR.
Tea plants are native to East Asia and evidence of tea consumption in China goes back to the 2nd century BC. In Laos, tea was presumably cultivated and traded as early as the 7th century (Earth Systems, 2016). Forest tea, which includes both ancient and wild tea1, has been grown in Northern Laos for centuries (Marseille, 1990). In the 1920s, the French brought tea from Vietnam to cultivate on the Bolaven plateau and recognized the quality of wild forest teas from Xieng Khouang (Pedersen et al., 2016).
VIET NAM - Under the framework of the project “Network for Agriculture and Rural Development Think-tanks for Countries in Mekong sub-region” (NARDT), IPSARD collaborated with experts from NARDT, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to publish the report “Impacts of Covid-19 pandemic on smallholder farmers and vulnerable rural people in Viet Nam”. This report is an attempt to provide more in-depth and reliable information for decision-making by the Vietnamese Government to cope with the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic.