Natalie DiNicola, Vice President of Monsanto Company’s Sustainability and Signature Partnerships, said in an interview with DTiNews that agriculture should be an engine for economic growth in Vietnam.
Natalie DiNicola, Vice President of Sustainability and Signature Partnerships, Monsanto Company
In your opinion, what are the challenges for the world in general and for Vietnam in particular in the near future?
I think for world’s agriculture there are some real challenges as we have two billion more people joining our planet in 2050, and we have more people who are gaining economic ability, they are shifting to a diet with quite more grain and quite more food. So, we have a big challenge in terms of enabling access to everyone to a balanced meal in face of climate change and with limited natural resources. We alos feel the pressures of water use and land available for agriculture.
In fact, a very interesting statistics from the United Nations showed that we will have to grow more food in the next 40 years than we have in the last 10,000 years. It’s accumulated while the world is on the face of a changing climate. So, I believe that agriculture in general is a very important part of meeting the need of the global challenges positively. And I believe it would require public and private sectors to work together to try to address these challenges.
So, in terms of Vietnam specifically, I feel that Vietnam has made a very good progress in agriculture, and I think it’s very good right now that the government is taking a fresh look at what the vision for agriculture need to be, particularly in the context of these challenges that we’ve discussed. I think there’s an opportunity for agriculture to be an engine for economic growth within the country.
So, in your view, how can Vietnam overcome such challenges to achieve sustainable development? And what’s the role of PPP cooperation in this process?
We believe that sustainable development in agriculture really needs to have three different goals all happening at the same time. While the farmers need to improve the amount they can produce, at the same time they need to use resources more efficiently and conserve resources, so we can protect the biodiversity. And the third it should ensure economic values for the farmers so that they can bring economic values to the community and ultimately to the country. So, helping farmers produce more, conserve more and improve their life in economic development, we feel all three have to happen at the same time to ensure sustainable development.
Public-private partnership (PPP) offers a very useful way of addressing these large challenges because the challenges are so difficult to counter. I don’t think anyone can solve it by themselves. So, it will take a role of government, along with the participation of the private sector and civil society with the farmers being put at the centre. A partnership cannot be sustainable unless it bring about economic values for farmers. When you look at how we’re going to build a more sustainable agriculture around for farmers, it would brings not only quantity but quality of agriculture and that’s a great approach.
Farmers should be put at the centre of the PPP cooperation
During the recent workshop on partnership and innovating for sustainable agriculture, many participants are concerned about farmers’ benefits when they join such PPP cooperation. In your view, who should be the person that decides the ratio of benefit sharing for stakeholders and how to ensure the highest benefits for farmers?
First of all it’s not one way of doing it as we have to tailor a partnership to the situation. I believe that farmers are very smart businesspeople and they will only make decisions that bring them value. And so when we are working with farmers and others, we always keep it in mind in order to enable farmers to make a living and to invest in the future so that they can continue to improve their farm. By doing this we can ensure both mutual and long-term values for that farmer.
We’re a company that needs to think about values for our shareholders and for our business as well. The government and other stakeholders need to think about their goals as well. So, I don’t think such partnership is one acquisition but I thank everybody has to come together and need to really look at the challenges and what we agree, what’s the vision that we’re going to try to achieve, how we can leverage the most about an organisation for that vision. We need to have some discussion around how can we share both the risks and the benefits. But in my experience if we have true belief in our vision together, you can find a balance for everybody.
Being an agriculture company, what has Monsanto done to help foster sustainable agriculture development in the world and in Vietnam as well?
Our company is completely dedicated to agriculture and to try to provide tools and information that more help farmers improve their productivity while conserving natural resources. I really have that sustainable development in mind. So, our investments are focused completely on ecological issues. And through our business we work to try to make those tools and information available to farmers everywhere in the world who are interested whatever size that farmer is. In many cases, we have set up several partnerships where we come together with our stakeholders to understand the best way to provide what the farmers need for certain situation.
Our business core is 100% about taking very good science and information in medicine to other parts in our society. We also apply a plan in agriculture to try to produce better tools and information for farmers. And it’s very exciting now because we’ve been not only focusing on providing better seeds but on the whole system of what farmers need in terms of practices that they use, access to market, access to information about the weather, and things like that. So, we continue to work to try to help farmers produce more while conserving natural resources at the same time.
Thank you very much!