The government is promoting a value chain linkage model aimed at ensuring safe food supply to consumers by using VietGAP certification. Currently there are about 557 supply chains have been voluntarily certified around the country. Agricultural cooperatives play an important role in these safe food supply chains with contribution of 27% in the total of certified chains. In particular, agricultural cooperatives play the role of organizing production for small scale farmers, common quality certification, common market access and linking with businesses in the value chain. However, the new type of cooperative has many difficulties in management capacity, access to capital and land so the scale of operation is small and the sustainability is low. In the future, the state needs realize policy to create a fair business environment for cooperatives, promote capacity strengthening and also changing the credit assess condition for agricultural cooperatives.
