Supplementing mechanisms to attract investment in agriculture

Vietnam has been implementing the agricultural restructuring project for 3 years, however the agricultural sector is still facing many difficulties, even experiencing negative growth in the first 6 months of 2016.

Attracting business investment in this sector is still very limited. This leads to difficulties in orienting the transformation of Vietnam's agricultural sector into a competitive commodity production sector. Regarding this issue, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Nguyen Xuan Cuong answered the press interview.

Minister Nguyen Xuan Cuong

Sir, in the first 6 months of this year, for the first time Vietnam's agriculture had negative growth. Could you please tell us the reason?

In the first half of 2016, for the first time in many years, agriculture had a negative GDP growth of 0.18%. Up to now, agriculture has played a very important role in economic development, 70% of the population still lives in the agricultural sector and currently has 46% of the workforce in this sector. Therefore, negative growth is a common concern of the whole industry, significantly affecting the lives of farmers, especially in difficult areas.

The reason is that climate change has disrupted all production areas, and the pace is more intense than predicted. Furthermore, Vietnam is deeply integrated into the world economy, agricultural products have more opportunities to go international but must accept fierce competition with world goods. Therefore, the agricultural sector must focus on restructuring towards commodity production, sustainable concentrated value chains.

After 3 years of implementing the Restructuring Project, what changes has the agricultural sector had, sir?

After 3 years of implementing the project, we have achieved some initial results of a premise nature such as: changes in the awareness of businesses, society, and people about restructuring. This is reflected in the fact that 63 provinces and cities all have specific projects and action programs.

For example, Lam Dong has applied high-tech agriculture to 25% of agricultural area, giving high income on average of 243 million VND/ha. Dong Thap has chosen 5 key products of the province such as: flowers, rice, duck, fruit, seafood to focus policies, regional planning... Or Ha Giang is a difficult mountainous province but has gone deep into exploiting advantages such as: vegetables, medicinal herbs, reorganizing livestock production.

In addition, some industries have restructured with clear results. The dairy industry has had the highest growth in the world in the past 5 years. In livestock farming, especially pig farming, each year produces 4 - 4.5 million tons of pork. Currently, medium and large scale farming accounts for 40%.

However, agricultural restructuring is a process of restructuring production, so it takes time. After 3 years, according to the general assessment, the restructuring has only stopped at some good models, some provinces produce goods, the rest generally need to restructure more drastically.

Some people say that if we want to restructure agriculture, we must call on businesses to invest in agriculture. What is the Minister's opinion on this issue?

To reorganize agricultural production in a modern direction, enterprises will be the core, the foundation for all linkages in the concentrated commodity production. To date, there are about 3,600 enterprises investing in agriculture out of a total of nearly half a million enterprises in the economy. In terms of quantity, less than 1%, of which 90% of enterprises investing in agriculture are small, even micro-small, the number of large enterprises playing the leading role is still small.

Agricultural production needs to continue to be promoted with many effective policies.

In recent times, policies and mechanisms have been continuously improved, focusing on encouraging enterprises to invest in agriculture. Especially Decree 210 of the Government. However, there are still some problems that make this policy difficult to put into practice. For example, Decree 210 applies to all regions, but the development conditions of each region are different, and the policy has not been clearly defined. Secondly, the post-investment support policy has a maximum level of only 2.5 billion VND. Meanwhile, agricultural investment is risky, some industries require large capital, and many localities are still receiving budget support from the Central Government, so it is difficult for the localities themselves to have funds to support agriculture. The Central Government only focuses on supporting large investment projects.

In addition, some forms of credit or land access are still inadequate. Therefore, the Prime Minister has assigned the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and related ministries to survey, evaluate, and propose further recommendations to amend Decree 210 to be more practical, encouraging enterprises to invest in agriculture. In particular, focusing on removing obstacles in land accumulation so that enterprises have conditions for large-scale production; focusing on a group of solutions to develop the collective economy, with cooperatives as the main subjects.

According to baotintuc