Livelihood Change of Farmhouseholdsin the Subburb of Nam Dinh City during Urbanization

The research was carried out in the suburban area of NamDinh city to: (i) to analyze changes of livelihoods of farmhouseholds in the area, (ii) to suggest recommendations to help farmhouseholds select livelihood changes in coming time. The research focused on livelihood activity changes based on surveying 180 farmhouseholds in the area. The research showed that the livelihoods of the farmhouseholds mainly relied on four main activity groups (1) agriculture, (2) worker and hired labor, (3) trade and service and (4) other activity. Livelihood activity change caused structural change of farmhousehold. The households engaged in agricultural activities decreased from 52.11% in 2011 to 40.53% in 2015; the proportion of households engaged in groups 2 and 3 increased from 34.37 to 52.54%; the percentage of household engaging in other activities decreased from 13.18 to 7.13%. The number of jobs, income and living conditions of the households increased. The main factors affecting livelihood changes of the farmhouseholds included natural calamity, disease epidemics, urban development, support policy, livelihood capital change and household’’ attitude. Based on these results, the following recommendations were proposed: providing sufficient information to prevent risk for the households, changing livelihood activities to match changing in centre urban of the city, supporting farmhouseholds to improve livelihood capitals as basis for livelihood activity changes, promoting farmhousehold’ creativity for livelihood activity changes, and improving some policies and regulations related to farmhouseholds.