Since 2006 CODESPA has been supporting the development of the market value chain for a fertilizer application technique called Fertilizer Deep Placement (FDP), through the project “Helping poor families in Yen Bai Province to sustainably improve their rice production by integrating them into markets for fertilizer pellets with the fertilizer deep placement method.” The project has been conducted continually in 3 phases, piloted in one district in Phase 1 (October 2006 – June 2008), then expanded to seven districts in Phase 2 (July 2008 – June 2010), and finally introduced in the two remaining poorest districts (July 2010 – June 2012). By October 2010, the project covered the whole province of Yen Bai.

FDP is a fertilizing technology popularized in Bangladesh by the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) from the late 1990s onwards. The technology was introduced to Vietnam in 2000 and then refined and adapted to local conditions by the Hanoi University of Agriculture (HUA) and International Development Enterprises (IDE), a US non-profit NGO6. It was designed to boost rice crop yields, reduce labor inputs in rice farming, and decrease the amount of fertilizer used in rice production. The deep placement of fertilizer brings about the effectiveness of the new fertilization method.