Page 20 - GUIDELINES FOR FOOD SYSTEMS ISSUES PRIORITIZATION, ACTOR AND ACTION MAPPING at sub-national levels in Vietnam

3.1. Summarize global and national food systems issues

In Step 1, the inter-disciplinary group, including PWG and/or NSG, responsible for the
activities will summarize and present prominent food systems issues at global and
national levels. This step is essential for building a shared understanding of food systems
issues and providing references for local stakeholders to discuss and identify local food
systems issues in the next step. The global and national issues are presented in Table 1,
deriving from the synthesis of multiple reports, studies as well as expert insights.

During the stakeholder consultation workshop, the group will present these issues in
the first plenary session. When presenting these issues, the group can make necessary
adaptations to highlight key points, using local examples.

Besides the presentation of global and national food system issues, local stakeholders
are also provided with presentations on the current state of food systems, which result
from the food systems profiling activities as per the Guidelines for food system profile
development at the sub-national level in Vietnam (Pham et al., 2025). The assessment
of the status of provincial food systems in developing food system profiles can provide
critical insights to support this step.

3.2. Identify provincial food systems issues

3.2.1. Breakout groups

After the plenary session to present the current state of provincial food systems and
global/national food systems issues, the following sessions require the division of
participants in breakout discussion groups. Hence, all participants from various agencies
and departments will be divided into three or four random groups, depending on the
number of invited participants (30-40 participants preferably). The random grouping can
be done by participants counting off 1, 2, 3 in sequence.

The curator of the workshop should quickly check the composition of each group to
ensure diversity of sectors and units. Redistribution of group members can be made if
needed to prevent the overrepresentation of some organizations in the same group. After
division, the discussion groups remain unchanged for the entire meeting.

3.2.2. Identify food system issues

For Step 2, the breakout groups will discuss how to identify food systems issues in the
province. Each group, formed as outlined in Section 3.1, will be provided with colored
post-it notes, marker pen, flip chart, and stickers to discuss and present the results. A0-
size templates for group discussion will be provided based on the food system framework
(see Annex 1).

Guidelines for food systems issues prioritization, actor and action mapping at subnational levels in Vietnam 19