With the Autumn harvest now complete across the country, Viet Nam looks set to record bumper food production figures this year, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Le Huy Ngo said. 36.7 million tonnes of grain were produced in 2003, including 34.2 million tonnes of unhusked rice. The country has regained its position as the world’s second largest rice exporter, with nearly 4 million tonnes exported despite difficulties caused by the weather and the vagaries of world markets. Only Thailand exported more.
Ngo said Viet Nam had also produced 2.4 million tonnes of pork, 630,000 tonnes of coffee and 350,000 tonnes of rubber. The sector recently implemented several programmes to raise productivity, such as adopting more intensive farming techniques to try to generate an average income of VND50 million (US$3,164) per hectare per year. To achieve this, many provinces combined rice cultivation with vegetable growing, livestock and fish farming. The ministry said 13 per cent of farmland in the Hong (Red) River Delta, and 12 per cent of land in the Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta was now sufficiently productive to earn VND50 million per hectare per year, with farmers growing high-quality rice varieties on 80 per cent of the southern delta’s cultivated area.
The central, coastal provinces, traditionally some of the country’s poorest, had launched a campaign under the slogan, ‘Earn money from sandy soil’, to boost incomes by farming shrimp, growing cassava, groundnuts and cashew nuts, and raising livestock.
In some parts of the country, there had been a shift from subsistence farming to commercial cash cropping for both the domestic and export markets, the ministry said. Examples included rice production in the Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta; coffee in Tay Nguyen (the Central Highlands); orchards in the south; and vegetable production near large cities. The area of land planted with cotton rose to 40,000ha this year, from 18,900ha in 2000, while the total area of orchards increased to 650,000ha from 565,000ha in the same period. The number of dairy cows increased to 74,000 from 35,000, with milk production rising to 122,000 tonnes from 52,000 tonnes.
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