HCM City Make Uses of Urban Agricultural Advantages

HCM City Make Uses of Urban Agricultural Advantages

The speed of urbanisation in Ho Chi Minh City is very fast and ever more areas of agricultural land are used to build industrial parks, export processing zones, factories and residential buildings. During the past five years, agricultural land in Ho Chi Minh City has been reducing by around 1,000 hectares a year on average.

The agricultural workforce has also reduced by 5 per cent annually, their number now standing at around only 144,000 labourers; accounting for one third of the total workforce in the city’s surrounding countryside, as more agricultural workers are moving to factory work.

However, agricultural production in Ho Chi Minh City is still developing upwards. In 2003, the city’s agricultural growth rate was at 9.1 per cent on-year and the values from agricultural production reached VND22 million (US$1,410) per hectares last year, up from VND5.4 million (US$346) in 1993.

Agricultural production accounted for 1.6 per cent of the city’s total gross domestic product (GDP) with VND 2,000 billion (US$128.2 million), the figure is much lower than that of other sectors such as industry and services however many provinces and localities nationwide cannot hope to emulate it.

To achieve the current results, it is significant that the city leaders, authorities and departments have built up long-term development strategies, then successfully fulfilled their plans by choosing the programme of two crops (safe vegetables and pineapple) and two animals (dairy cows and tiger shrimps) as the breakthrough targets.

As a result, Ho Chi Minh City is now leading the country in raising dairy cows with around 50,000 herds, and is the major supplier of dairy cow breeding to other localities.

The city provided around 100 hectares in Cu Chi and Hoc Mon districts to grow organic vegetables to supply city supermarkets and stores yet failed to meet the increasing demands. The new organic vegetable cultivation model has also helped local farmers boost the cultivation of clean and fresh vegetables to achieve better earnings.

The aquaculture areas in two districts of Can Gio and Nha Be are meanwhile expanding. As of June 2004, the total aquaculture raising areas reached 5,000 hectares, of which around 2,500 hectares contain tiger shrimp. Besides commercial shrimp farming, the two districts have 59 tiger shrimp breeding production farms with a capacity of 950 million breeding yearly to supply for local shrimp farmers. In addition, the Ho Chi Minh City Agricultural Promotion Centre has 5 blue-legged shrimp breeding farms with total capacity of 10 million a year and 70 hectares of aquaculture with an output of around 100 tonnes.

The effectiveness of these projects helped bring the city's total fisheries output in 2003 up 33.8 per cent against that of 2002.

Ho Chi Minh City also successfully changed around 2,000 hectares of low agricultural production land into Cayene pineapple cultivation to provide enough of the fruit for the Delta Fruit Juice Processing Plant in the city.

Besides the benefits from the "Two Crops, Two Animals" programme Ho Chi Minh City has developed several other typical products to meet the demand of domestic consumption and exports such as ornamental fish and flowers.

In a recent meeting, the acting Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Cao Duc Phat said that Ho Chi Minh City authorities need not necessarily maintain the low rice cultivation areas which only yields an estimated 150,000 tonnes a year, but should switch to other higher productivity crops.

Since then, Ho Chi Minh City, which was not concerning much about the national food security and economic growth, has focused much on the development of tropical fruits trees and flowers and ornamental fish. These new products are consumed in large quantities in the domestic markets as well as foreign ones, with earnings of between millions and billions of Vietnamese dong.

Besides ornamental flowers, ornamental fish are another of Ho Chi Minh City’s main products, ranking top in earnings among other agricultural production.

Ho Chi Minh City is at the meantime interested in raising crocodiles for export. Crocodiles are now raised by farmers, households and families on a small scale in district 12 and in Thu Duc while the city is to build an ornamental fish village in Cu Chi district.

According to Nguyen Thien Nhan, Vice Chairman of Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee, the new development of agricultural production is still in need of more investment and incentives to raise local farmers’ living standards.

In fact, the annual average income of farmers in Ho Chi Minh City, which between VND7 million (US$448) and VND10 million (US$641) in 2000 is only one third of an industrial workers. To increase city farmer’s earnings, Ho Chi Minh City should encourage the development of rural crafts, agricultural and non-agricultural services. In addition, Ho Chi Minh City should not only reduce the low rice cultivation areas but also consider the remaining 1,500 hectares of low salt production in Can Gio district.