After over 30 years of renovation, Vietnam has moved from a country annually importing 2 million tonnes of food to an agricultural country supplying sufficient amount of basic food for 90 million people and obtaining US$30 billion of exports with an absolute surplus of nearly US$10 billion. However, the agricultural sector is facing three significant challenges.
The first challenge is economic integration. With 13 million households averaging 0.3 hectares each for agriculture, it is difficult to adopt policies on industrialisation of agriculture, commodity production arrangement and application of technology to form large production areas and high-value chains. The fragmentation of land has led to a challenge facing production control. Therefore, the land consolidation policy has been implemented since 2000 and until now, become a breakthrough of new rural construction.
The second challenge is climate change, which has become fiercer than forecast in 2012. In the first 6 months of 2016, seven localities of Vietnam were damaged by climate change. The agricultural yield of some key areas of agriculture in the Mekong Delta for the first time was reduced to 1.3 million tonnes. The entire Central Highlands and South Central areas were affected by serious drought; 14 northern provinces suffered from cold weather and 3 first hurricanes at the beginning of the season caused huge damages. Generally, in the first 6 months of this year, agriculture yield decreased by 0.18 per cent of GDP.
The next challenge goes along with the advantages of economic integration. Since joining the WTO in 2007, Vietnam has signed and implemented 7 FTAs and will join another 6 new FTAs. On the positive side, Vietnam is getting deeply integrated into the world economy, as well as creating opportunities to expand the market for commodity exports. But the challenge is not small. It can be said that there are many tensions in the initial stages. This requires efforts on restructuring agriculture production towards centralisation, creating high-value and sustainable chains, and adapting to climate change conditions to help Vietnamese agricultural goods maintain its share of the international playing field and not lose out on the home market.
In the forum of "Development of agricultural enterprises in the process of agricultural restructuring associated with building a new countryside" held by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development on September 8, Minister Nguyen Xuan Cuong expected that businesses will now focus more on investment in agriculture, along with analysis on short- and long-term potentials of sea and forest. Pointing out the advantages of investment policies on agriculture, the Minister also admitted responsibility for problems of environmental policies on supporting investment environment transparency.
Minister Cuong said that after September 8, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development will continue to implement outreach programmes and organise a business forum for the businesses in the agricultural sector. This programme consists of three major contents: exploiting the advantages of agricultural products of 10 national brands, each valued at US$1 billion or more; focusing on the segments of the key products of each locality and focusing on local specialty products of each sub-area, like the One Commune One Product (OCOP) model, which is successfully being implemented in Quang Ninh province.
Thanh Yen
Vietnamese
