Mobile phone use for farm-related activities by ethnic minority farmers during the Covid-19 pandemic in Quang Tri Province, Central Vietnam

1.Introduction

Mobile phones are becoming an important device in Vietnam and the developing world. According to statistical data from the Ministry of Information and Communications, the number of mobile phone subscribers (as of the third quarter of 2021) in Vietnam reached 123 million, an increase of 0.88% over the same period last year. Vietnam is one of the top ten countries with the most smartphones, with 71.54 million smartphones in use by Vietnamese people [1]. According to Burra et al. [2], 90% of Vietnamese farmers own a mobile phone, and 42% of mobile phone users have 3G or 4G connections. An MMA [3] report indicated that 68% of mobile phone users in rural Vietnam own a smartphone, and those users spend three hours connected to the internet. In addition, the report also showed that users in rural areas spend 40% of their online time chatting with others using chat apps. Rural Vietnamese use instant messaging apps 6 to 7 times daily, for 20 minutes per time. Rural people’s rising use of mobile phones is seen as a key premise for the agricultural digital transformation in Vietnam [4].

Ethnic minorities occupy 14.7% of Vietnam’s population. Ethnic groups live mainly in mountainous areas with a high poverty rate, low educational attainment, and low infrastructure conditions [5]. Ethnic minority communities are often known as one of the most vulnerable groups under adverse external impacts because of their low livelihood resilience. Under the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lives of ethnic minorities are facing more difficulty than the majority group (the Kinh group). According to UN Women [6], ethnic minorities witnessed a greater drop in income as a result of COVID-19 than the Kinh group, with 70.3% of their households experiencing a decrease in income compared with 65.5% of Kinh households. More importantly, the income recovery of ethnic minority households was slower than that of Kinh households [7]. In agricultural production, commodity production networks are disrupted by travel restrictions, making agricultural products difficult to consume. Ethnic minority households, especially female-headed households, faced more difficulties due to lack of means of transportation, driving licenses, or even the fact that they could not drive to transport their agricultural products to central areas for sale, while wholesalers were unable to collect agricultural products from communities [8]. In addition, agricultural extension services and input supply services were disrupted, causing a slew of problems for ethnic minority farmers.

After the Covid-19 outbreak, the Vietnamese government has prioritized digital transformation in agriculture. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) established a Digital Transformation Steering Committee in 2021 to guide the implementation of the digital transformation task, which is focused into three pillars: the digital MARD, the digital agriculture economy, and digital farmers. Digital farmers targeted the raise of digital device adoption in farm related activities such as smartphone, autonomous devices, drone. The main purpose is to make it easier for farmers to interact, connect with value chain actors, and boost productivity and efficiency through automation.

However, until currently, there are very few studies on the use of mobile phones in farm-related activities by ethnic minority farmers in Vietnam, so there is little scope to explore the role of this digital device in their farming needs. Simultaneously, no research has been identified to examine the relationship between farmer characteristics such as gender, age, and educational status and their agricultural-related mobile phone usage. Therefore, this research, with the aim of exploring the use of mobile phones for farm-related activities of ethnic minority farmers, will be helpful to policymakers, extension agencies, and other stakeholders as they work to develop and provide digital services for specific groups of ethnic minority farmers in Central Vietnam.

2.The role of mobile phone usage in smallholder farming

In fact, the role of mobile phone usage for farmers in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic is widely found in the literature. With their functions, mobile phones provide digital solutions to smallholder farmers, allowing them to seize opportunities and increase their resilience to the pandemic’s disruptions [9]. Smallholders can use mobile phones to access information on technologies and good practices when access to formal education institutions and printing materials is limited [10]. Mobile phones can promote farmers’ trading [11], allowing farmers and other parties in remote areas to communicate more easily [12]. Digital agricultural extension and digital trading solutions through using mobile phones, therefore, have been deployed in many countries to adapt to COVID-19, including Vietnam.

Mobile phones are increasingly popular in developing countries, becoming an important tool for smallholder farmers adopting farm-related activities. Aside from standard calling and texting functions, mobile phones allow farmers to use and communicate with one another via various applications. Evidence suggests that mobile phone use has enormous potential for improving agricultural production [13–18]. The benefits of mobile phones used in farm-related tasks have been documented in many studies [19–23].

Many scholars have admitted that mobile phones have strengthened farmers’ communication, interactions, and linkages. This point of view was confirmed by Deichmann [20] and earlier by Razaque and Hassa [19], who found that mobile phones increased the cohesion and social interactions between farmers and other actors in the value chain [19,20]. Mobile phones enable farmers to communicate over considerable distances [21,24]. By using mobile phones, farmers could communicate directly with the traders to sell their products and negotiate prices themselves [25], contributing to an increase in farm-gate prices from improvements in bargaining power with intermediaries [16,26]. Mobile phones also shorten the distance between food chain actors involved in producing, processing, transporting, and marketing food [23]. In addition, with a mobile phone, farmers can approach larger intermediaries directly and sell a larger volume of products at a higher price [16,20].

Mobile phone usage provides farmers with information to make better decisions in agriculture production. Aker [27] recognized a wide range of uses for mobile phones, one of which was assisting farmers in getting information. Mobile phones have improved access to information from both private and public sectors, such as extension services, research systems, etc. According to GSMA [22], farmers can benefit from mobile advisory services like weather forecasts and extreme weather advisories, which can help them make better decisions and mitigate risks. Meanwhile, Treinen and Elstraeten [28] revealed that mobile phones could assist farmers in accessing or sharing information and receiving non-face-to-face training. The role of mobile phones in providing extension advice and weather information as well as in exchanging information between farmers, was also confirmed by Ramatu et al. [29] and Aldosary et al. [25]. In addition, mobile phones improve access to market information for smallholder farmers [16].

Farmers can also use mobile phones to access financial services [21,22], agricultural inputs [30,31], insurance [22], and to share or rent tractors, labor, and other resources with others [20]. More importantly, mobile phones significantly lower farmers’ costs [29,32].

3.Research method

This research selected Quang Tri province, located in Central Vietnam as the study site to collect the data. According to the General Statistics Office of Vietnam [33], the province has a population of 633,400 people, living in 168,495 households with an average of 4.4 people per household. The province has a rural population of 436,962 people (accounting for 68.97%), and the local people’s lives depend heavily on agricultural production.

The residence territory of ethnic minorities in Quang Tri province is primarily western mountainous areas, with a natural area of 313,675 hectares, accounting for 68% of the province’s natural area. Currently, ethnic minorities live in 38 communes and towns (mainly distributed in 2 districts, including Dakrong and Huong Hoa), primarily in the Van Kieu and Pa Ko groups, with a population of over 85,000 people. Almost 100% of ethnic minority households in Quang Tri have their livelihoods mainly based on agriculture, of which 11,806 are poor households, accounting for 28.32% of the whole province (the poverty rate of the whole province is 7.03%) [34].

This study randomly selected 180 ethnic smallholder households in the Dakrong and Huong Hoa districts of Quang Tri province who use mobile phones (either basic mobile phones or smartphones). The household survey was undertaken in March 2022, after the longest outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Quang Tri province (starting in April 2021). The respondents were the key farmers in households who played a key role in agricultural production and decision-making in the households. A structured questionnaire was designed to collect data related to the adoption of mobile phone applications and functions and the purposes of mobile phone use.

Data were coded and analyzed using IBM-SPSS statistical package. Count and percentage were used to describe the response of smallholder farmers to the use of mobile phones. With the null hypothesis of whether gender, age group and education level, and the usage of mobile phone applications and functions are independent, the Fisher’s Exact Test was applied. This type of test is commonly used in the examination of small samples, however, it is valid for all sample sizes [35]. Thus, this kind of test was chosen to ensure that, in some situations, low expected frequencies could guarantee the accuracy of the test findings.

4.Results

5.Discussion and conclusion

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic influence, mobile phone use plays an important role in farmers’ communication. However, the use of mobile phones is not exactly the same among farmers. Our empirical findings indicate that farmer characteristics have statistically significant relationships with the use of mobile phone applications and functions. Calling is a primary function of a mobile phone, so most farmers can easily use it for agricultural-related purposes. However, with applications and functions that required knowledge and skills in digital technology, such as Zalo, Facebook, YouTube, Google search, etc., male, young, and higher-educated farmers were more likely to adopt. These findings corroborated the conclusions of Treinen [28] and GSMA [22], which stated that their digital literacy influenced farmers’ use of digital devices. This digital access disparity must be addressed in the future digitization programs of the government (e.g., digital extension services).

Ethnic minorities in Quang Tri province used mobile phones for various farm-related activities when face-to-face communication was limited due to COVID-19. Mobile phones have become essential devices for farmers to access and exchange market information, receive weather information, get extension advisories, learn about new farming practices and technologies, contact and buy farm inputs, etc. Obviously, mobile phone use has grown in popularity and has progressed beyond simple communication, as mentioned by Henze and Ulrichs [36]. This finding is very meaningful because ethnic minority farmers in Vietnam are notorious for having poor knowledge, skills, and a low capacity to access digital technologies. In the context of digital technology being considered as a strategy to ”take a shortcut” in agricultural development in Vietnam and other developing countries, disadvantaged farmers’ access to mobile phones or digital devices has created a foundation for accelerating the digitization of agriculture. This finding partly helps to assuage worries raised by Trendov et al. [37], who found that digitalization has caused a divide between early adopters and skeptics, small-scale and large-scale farmers, gender, and urbanization level.

Logically, a higher percentage of younger and better-educated farmers use mobile phones for farm-related activities than the other farmer groups. This highlights the importance of these farmer groups in using mobile phones in agriculture, as Poushter and Oates [38] and Trendov et al. [37] have noted. Young and highly educated farmers are the pioneers who will be the leading groups of farmers in terms of using digital technologies. They can serve as models for a wide range of digital technology solutions the Vietnamese government supports, such as digital extension services, e-commerce, agricultural applications, etc. Furthermore, female farmers are frequently referred to as the most disadvantaged group, with low capacity and technological access [16,28,39]. However, ethnic minority women in the research area were more active than men in utilizing mobile phones for various tasks, including marketing farm products, contacting and purchasing farm inputs, and accessing various farming-related services. This finding implies that when women have access to digital devices like mobile phones, they can use them to improve their agricultural production. Mobile phone adoption among women, thus, has the potential to boost agricultural productivity improvements and develop women’s livelihoods, as concluded by Deichmann [20], Treinen [28], and Quandt et al. [17].