How do Viet Nam’s policies shape food environments? A landscape analysis from SHiFT researchers

Current food systems are failing to address the triple burden of malnutrition — undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, and overnutrition. In Viet Nam, progress has been made in reducing the prevalence of undernourishment and childhood stunting, but rates of overweight and obesity are rapidly increasing, especially in urban areas. It is well understood that people’s food environments affect their food choices, but how do the Vietnamese government’s policies shape food environments in ways that support healthy diets and nutrition? To help answer this question, researchers from the CGIAR Initiative on Sustainable Healthy Diets through Food Systems Transformation (SHiFT), in collaboration with the Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Development (IPSARD), conducted a policy landscape analysis of Viet Nam’s food environment.

Food environments encompass the physical, economic, policy, and sociocultural conditions that influence an individual’s food choices and shape the outcomes of these choices, such as diets, nutritional status, environmental sustainability, or socioeconomic equity. In Viet Nam, food environments have evolved in response to many factors, including globalization, economic growth, higher agricultural productivity, and urbanization. These changes have also impacted lifestyles and incomes, driving demand for more convenient and diverse food options. In line with what trends observed globally, dietary patterns in Viet Nam have consequently shifted from traditional, locally specific diets to diets characterized by higher consumption of fat and sugar, as well as animal-source and processed foods.

Viet Nam’s government has implemented a series of policies to improve food sovereignty, food security, and food safety, and, to a lesser extent, promote healthy eating. But there is little clarity on whether and how these policies influence different aspects of the food environment. In this policy landscape analysis, SHiFT’s researchers, supported by their IPSARD colleagues, aimed to explore and clarify how the country’s regulatory framework contributes to or detracts from a healthy food environment. This work contributes to SHiFT’s ongoing research activities in Viet Nam, which work to identify key policy barriers and propose context-specific and evidence-based solutions that support sustainable healthy diets for all.

For this specific analysis, the researchers carried out an extensive review of more than 850 policy documents, identifying relevant content in 232 of them. The analysis highlights significant policy efforts to enhance food environments, as well as persistent challenges and policy gaps. The findings indicate that the most comprehensive bundles of national policies focus on food safety measures, the elaboration of food-based dietary guidelines, and the reduction of taxes on healthy foods. On the other hand, several critical areas remain neglected, with minimal policy attention paid to the nutritional quality of foods, limitations on advertising unhealthy foods to children, subsidies for healthy foods, and the promotion of healthy food availability in stores and food service outlets.

Using the policy gaps identified by the analysis, the researchers are formulating an extensive list of suggestions for policy recommendations. In the second part of 2024, the team intends to engage in a participatory process with a panel of experts to evaluate, rank, and prioritize these suggested recommendations. This process aims to distill these recommendations into a more focused and targeted list to be shared with policymakers, thereby initiating a policy dialogue on the essential transformative changes required for food environments and food systems in Viet Nam.

The International Food Policy Research Institute and the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT lead SHiFT in close collaboration with Wageningen University and Research and with contributions from the International Potato Center. SHiFT combines high-quality nutritional and social science research capacity with development partnerships to generate innovative, robust solutions that contribute to healthier, more sustainable dietary choices and consumption of sustainable healthy diets. It builds on CGIAR’s unparalleled track record of agricultural research for development, including ten years of work on food systems and nutrition under the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health.

Header image: Street market scene. Photo by Pathumporn Thongking/UN Women from Flickr.