CGIAR, Vietnam-Cambodia partners, launch CGIAR Asian Mega-Deltas initiative

To promote resilient, inclusive, and productive Asian Mega-Deltas, CGIAR, together with government agencies from Vietnam and Cambodia and other relevant stakeholders, officially launched the initiative on Securing the Food Systems of Asian Mega-Deltas for Climate and Livelihood Resilience or AMD through an inception workshop held in TTC Can Tho Hotel, Can Tho City, Vietnam on 28-29 June 2022.

The initiative will focus on the three main deltas in Asia, such as Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta in Bangladesh and India, Irrawaddy Delta in Myanmar, and Mekong River Delta in Vietnam and Cambodia.

In his introduction of the AMD initiative, Dr. Björn Ole Sander, the Country Representative to Vietnam of International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the AMD Initiative Leader, emphasized the importance of the deltas as “food baskets” for the countries in the region. He shared that AMD’s goal is for the Asian Mega-Deltas to “maintain socio-ecological integrity, adapt to climatic and other stressors, and support human prosperity and wellbeing by removing systemic barriers to the scaling of transformative technologies and practices at community, national and regional levels.”

To achieve the objective of AMD, he elaborated on the five focus areas that the various CGIAR centers involved in the initiative, together with the different stakeholders, will work on, such as:

Adapting deltaic production systems; Nutrition-sensitive deltaic agrifood systems; De-risking delta-oriented value chains; Inclusive deltaic food-systems governance; and Evidence-based delta development planning

The inception workshop fostered participation from the different partners in designing a more stakeholder-responsive work plan for the five focus areas. In his opening remarks during the program, Mr. Le Thanh Tung, the Deputy Director for South of the Department of Crop Production-Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development of Vietnam, encouraged all participants to be involved actively in the inception workshop by taking “this opportunity…