Over the past 20 years, my home country of Vietnam has moved from struggling to grow enough food to feed our population to becoming a major food exporter. Vietnamese farmers today face a new challenge, however: waning demand for rice, our primary export crop. With agriculture accounting for 20 percent of Vietnam’s Gross Domestic Product and half of the country’s workforce, this struggle to find buyers presents a significant threat to the livelihoods of thousands of farmers and workers.

This has left many farmers in my country with a dilemma — how to convert from traditional rice operations to crops that are in higher demand.

To assist, the Vietnamese government in 2012 began working to help farmers transition their rice paddy fields to corn as part of the country’s Agricultural Restructuring Plan. In part due to a growing population and middle class, corn is in high demand in Vietnam, with about 1.5 million tons imported annually. Much of the corn imported in Vietnam is used to make animal feed. While demand for corn is strong, the drive to produce more of it in Vietnam raised a new question: could it be done without disrupting the rice-growing ecosystem that remains vital to the country and so many of its farmers?

As a company focused on agriculture and helping farmers around the world deal with challenges — and as part of our broader commitment to the World Economic Forum’s (Davos) GrowAsia initiative — Monsanto began looking for ways to help. Rather than disrupting current rice-growing practices, Vietnamese farmers needed a complete solution for growing corn on a rice farm, including land management and water control techniques, good hybrid seeds for local conditions, and proper tools and equipment to get the most out of corn harvests.

We partnered with farmers, local grain collectors and various departments within the Vietnamese government to introduce a rice-to-corn rotation process to help farmers rotate between crops, while reducing impact on the environment at the same time. Through this effort, we’re helping farmers to more easily rotate between corn and rice crops, and to adopt techniques like conservation tillage farming, which helps to preserve topsoil and other natural resources. Additionally, we worked with local departments of agriculture and transferred corn planting knowledge to more than 8,000 farmers in the Mekong Delta.

These collaborative efforts have achieved significant results. In a national economy where the average annual income is less than $2,000 per person, many farmers in the Mekong Delta have doubled or even tripled their profits. Today, as a result of these efforts, more than 8,000 farmers in the region have earned more than $1 million combined in incremental income since 2012.

We’re encouraged by these results, and proud to play a part in a program that helps farmers not only grow enough food to feed a growing population, but to grow the right food at the right time to best match both local and global demand.