HCM City to Invest in Advantageous Fields of Mekong Delta

From 2000 to June 2011, HCM City signed social and economic cooperation programmes with 34 provinces and cities, including 13 Mekong Delta provinces. Authorities and businesses in the city joined hands with their partners in 13 Mekong Delta localities to carry out more than 782 projects worth VND198,680 billion in total.

 

Mr Nguyen Phong Quang, Head of the Steering Committee for the Southwest, said HCM City plays an important role in socio-economic development of Vietnam and the southern economic zone. It is the centre of industry, commerce, finance, service, tourism, science and technology and a hub of domestic and foreign trade. It plays a crucial role in regional development linkage. For that reason, the Steering Committee guided the signing of a comprehensive cooperation agreement with the city’s governing People’s Committee in order to bring the partnership between the city and 13 Mekong Delta provinces to a new plane.

 

Experts pointed out that the Mekong Delta had failed to take many advantages. The first is in regional development network planning: where to develop centralised industries, where to develop trade and services, where to develop agriculture, forestry, fisheries, etc. The next is the opportunity for commercial exchange. In spite of its large population, the Mekong Delta is not considered a market for commodities manufactured by regional provinces and Ho Chi Minh City.

 

Besides, other advantages of the Mekong Delta are geographical location, natural resources and climate. Human resources are also an important advantage that has not been made proper use of. At present, more than 20 million people are living in the Mekong Delta. In the medium and long terms, the robust development of the region depends heavily on these advantages.

 

In recent years, the city signed and carried out a lot of bilateral cooperation programmes with southwestern provinces and achieved many important results on different fronts, especially trade, tourism and services. However, when applied, these programmes confront certain difficulties that require active support from central authorities and strong regional coordination to generate better outcomes.

 

The Mekong Delta is one of seven economic regions in Vietnam. Agriculture is its economic strength. Its agricultural value leads the country, accounting for 33.2 percent of the country’s total agricultural value. Its industrial production value accounts for 9.23 percent of the country’s industrial production value, just behind the Southeast and the Red River Delta. According to statistics, the Mekong Delta now has more than 151 large-scale concentrated industrial parks, of which 26 were established under decision of the Prime Minister. Many of them are located in Long An province and Can Tho City. To date, industrial zones have attracted more than US$1 billion of foreign direct investment (FDI) and some VND15,820 billion of domestic investment capital. Industrial park-located investment projects are mainly involved in production and processing of agro- forestry and aquatic products.

One weakness of the cooperation programmes between HCM City and the Mekong Delta is high quality human resource training. The Mekong Delta is home to tens of millions of farmers. Some of them have shifted to work in industrial parks and export processing zones, but they have not had full and systematic training, which results in low labour productivity. Speaking of this issue, Mr Gian Tu Trung, Rector of PACE Business School, said, to have a "new agriculture" competitive enough on the global scale, we must first have "new people" energetic, smart, insightful and visionary. He suggested advanced training for farmers.

 

Mr Le Hoang Quan, Chairman of HCM City People's Committee, said human resource training for the Mekong Delta is one of the major goals HCM City cares about in this strategic partnership. “As a top southern training centre, we believe that HCM City will provide important working skills, and science and technology and serves the role of regional linkage.”