Over the last 30 years, Viet Nam has managed a remarkable development of its agricultural sector and its energy sector. However, challenges remain in both sectors. Low productivity, a lack of market development and communication as well as pressure on the income security of farmers are persisting challenges in the agricultural sector. Furthermore, climate change poses an ever - increasing threat to agriculture production, necessitating the development of more renewable energy sources in the sector to reduce its Greenhouse Gas emissions. Recently, a new challenge has arisen at the nexus of both sectors, involving land-use conflicts caused by the increasing influx of wind and solar energy investments. The already large and growing number of new solar PV investment projects in particular has raised concerns particularly in the Vietnamese “food basket “provinces in the South with regard to potential land-use conflicts.

Solar PV dual-use or agrivoltaic concepts can resolve this land-use conflict between energy and agriculture production, by combining both on the same site. Developed in the early 1980’s in Germany, the concept has been implemented in a number of countries with hundreds of (mainly small scale) projects and applications. Recently, a growing number of larger, commercial projects have been implemented in countries such as China, Japan, Italy or France. Solar dual-use provides multiple socio-economic benefits that are mainly based on the key concept of the increased land productivity of the combined system, compared to the single- use of the same area of land.

The analysis of international best practice and scientific monitoring of pilot projects provides the necessary background to identify a number of crops and aquacultural products in Viet Nam suitable for dual-use applications. Among them are popular crops such as rice, corn/maize, cassava, vegetables of various kinds, soybean, coffee, tea, low growing fruit trees and fish / shrimp production in ponds.