| Sumario: | Food safety and animal health issues are increasingly important constraints to smallholder pig
production in Viet Nam. Recent studies have highlighted the significant prevalence of animal
disease and food‐borne pathogens inherent within the Vietnamese pig sector. These in turn have
important negative livelihoods effects on smallholder pig producers and other value chain actors,
as well as important public health impacts. An important research gap is in identifying ex‐ante
appropriate market‐based policy responses that take into account the tradeoffs between
improved animal health and food safety outcomes and their associated costs for different value
chain actors as a means of developing chain‐level solutions for their control. In this paper, we
constructed a system dynamics model of the pig value chain that combines a detailed model of
herd production and marketing with modules on short‐ and long‐term investment in pig capacity,
and decisions by value chain actors to adopt different innovations. The model further highlights
the feedbacks between different actors in the chain to identify both the potential entry points for
upgrading food safety and animal health as well as potential areas of tension within the chain that
may undermine uptake. Model results demonstrate that interventions at nodal levels (e.g. only at
farm or slaughterhouse level) are less cost‐effective and sustainable than those that jointly
enhance incentives for control across the value chain, as weak links downstream undermine the
ability of producers to sustain good health practices.
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