Burning Questions
Fellowship Award Winners

Brian Cook

Location: U.K.
Primary academic field: Food systems
Award category: PhD Holder

Guidance Memo

• Title: Finance and farming: Understanding development finance and industrial animal agriculture in Vietnam
• How to cite: Cook, Brian. Finance and farming: Understanding development finance and industrial animal agriculture in Vietnam. Tiny Beam Fund, 8 May 2025, https://doi.org/10.15868/socialsector.44928.
• What We Learned From It: 

  • Public development banks plays an important role in financing industrial animal agriculture in Vietnam, navigating in a landscape with a complex interplay between economic development goals, food security, and environmental sustainability.

  • Vietnam's livestock sector, dominated by pig and poultry production, is undergoing a significant transition from traditional smallholder farming to industrial animal agriculture, driven by government policies, rising local and global meat demand, and corporate investment.

  • Despite climate commitments, public development banks like the World Bank Group and Asian Development Bank continue to provide significant funding for industrial livestock operations, feed production, and processing infrastructure in Vietnam. This financing often contradicts sustainability goals and contributes to environmental degradation, while transparency and accountability remain significant challenges. The Guidance Memo explores the institutional drivers behind this funding, including deeply embedded beliefs in development banks about animal protein's importance for nutrition and development.

  • In spite of structural barriers to change, there are emerging opportunities, such as growing recognition of sustainability issues and rising consumer awareness. Frontline organizations and policymakers can follow the practical recommendations in the report to redirect development finance toward sustainable alternatives, from leveraging accountability frameworks to promoting transition finance models that support smallholders and regenerative agriculture practices, ultimately calling for a just agricultural transition in Vietnam.

Links

• Read the Guidance Memo
• Read the Annotated Bibliography

Some of the Things We Really Liked when We Read the Application:

• Financing is very important in any industry in any country - and it is especially so in developing countries such as Vietnam that are in the process of industrializing various sectors, including animal agriculture.
• At the same time this topic is not well understood by front-line organizations and campaigners. That is why providing an accessible and practical resource that explains the role played by international funders (e.g., multilateral development banks, development finance institutions, national development banks) in the expansion of industrial animal agriculture in Southeast Asia appealed to us.