The "One Must Do, Five Reductions" (1M5R) program was certified in 2013, by Vietnam Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, as a national approach to promoting the best management practices in lowland rice cultivation. The main idea behind 1M5R is the use of goodquality/certified seeds (the One Must Do) as well as the reduction of seed rates, pesticide use, fertilizer inputs, water use, and postharvest losses (Five Reductions). However, the impact of these farming practices is not well

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... derstood. This study employs the propensity score matching (PSM) approach to investigate the factors that affect the adoption of the 1M5R practice and to estimate this technique's impact on the economic performance of rice cultivation. Primary data were collected through a household survey of 380 rice farms in four provinces in the Mekong Delta (MKD), Vietnam. The findings indicate that adopting the 1M5R technique is significantly correlated with the educational level of household heads, their memberships in paddy cooperatives, and their attendance to previous training classes. Additionally, the results of the PSM indicate that applying the 1M5R technical package helps farmers to reduce their production cost by 10%, increase a paddy's selling price by 4.5% per kg, and obtain 10% more profit, compared to traditional farming households. The return on investment for adopters increased by 22%. However, while the findings indicates that a sustainable farming technique is advantageous to local farmers, they fail to indicate any paddy yield increase in treatment fields, because most input items are reduced. Therefore, farmers who are well-educated in paddy households should be targeted for 1M5R training classes and cooperatives memberships to expand this eco-friendly model and enhance the economic benefits to rice smallholders in MKD.