Making Rebound for Sea Economic Development

According to the Master Plan of Social-economic development to 2020, Kien Giang province will become a province strong at sea economy, being the bridge between Mekong Delta with countries in the region and in the world. To carry out this task, Kien Giang has worked out many measures to utilise all resources to continuously develop the provincial sea economy.

 

Kien Giang province is located in a motive economic zone of the Mekong Delta. Regarding regional relation, Kien Giang is the destination of some important highways and water routes. The sea off Kien Giang has varied abundant natural resources with quite good reserve and scale, which enables strong development of important sea economic sectors.

 

 With sea area of over 63,000 square kilometres and coast of 200 kilometres, Kien Giang has one of the longer coastlines among the 28 coastal localities. Kien Giang’s seafront is an open door to other South East Asian countries, convenient for economic cooperation and exchange, and resource development.

 

Given such potential and advantages, the sea economy is determined as Kieng Giang province’s strength. Kien Giang leaders have paid close attention to developing the sea economy into the local spearhead, always regarding this as a most important task, and initially gained some considerable achievements in primary economic-social changes. In 2005 – 2010, Kien Giang maintained sea economy annual growth over 18 percent. In fishery exploitation alone, over 60,000 labourers were mobilized directly in fishing, catching hundreds of thousands of tonnes to serve the domestic market and processing for export. Especially in 2010, sea economy’s contribution to provincial social-economic development was about 70 percent.

 

Beside fishery growing and exploitation, local sea and island tourism has been thriving. Phu Quoc Island, the ecotourism resort centre of regional stature, has attracted a large amount of national and international investment into tourism development, infrastructure construction projects and will become the national island city in future. Other islands such as Ba Lua archipelago (Kien Luong) and Hon Tre (Kien Hai) are also completing infrastructure, promising to become attractive tourism destinations in the near future.

 

Kien Giang’s strategic objective of sea economic development to 2015 is to basically complete sea economic infrastructure, comprehensively develop economic-social fields, strengthen national defence and security, and ensure national sovereignty on sea area. Kien Giang also targets to develop sea sectors and industries of provincial advantages in modern direction with rapid and sustainable growth rate, high efficiency and in long term vision.

 

From now to 2015, Kien Giang province will concentrate all resources to upgrade, improve and newly build key works, then complete and put into operation as the basis for the sea economy such as: Ha Tien international border gate; international harbour, airport and transport network around Phu Quoc Island; Asian Highway connecting with Cambodia and Thailand; Phu Quoc Thermoelectricity plant 200MW, and the 5,200 MW Kien Luong plant. The sea economy development objective in total provincial GDP by 2015 is 78 percent; income per capita of residents in coastal and island areas is twice that of other residential areas.

 

To achieve this strategic objective, Kien Giang province will focus on implementing planning activities, building investment projects to develop the sea economy and give coastal and sea-island regions the ability to break through economically. Promote private enterprises in the direction of encouraging investment into industries exploiting sea potentials as well as serving coastal, island area development; found large scale businesses, make investment in depth through applying technologies, increase good and services’ value. Besides, the province will also intensify international cooperation, investment into highly qualified human resources to meet demand of sea economic development.