The Mekong Delta will modernize post-harvest technology for rice.
The provinces in the Mekong Delta are implementing numerous projects to improve the quality of rice in order to increase its competitiveness in the world market, primarily by modernizing post-harvest technology.
These projects will help the Mekong Delta reduce rice production costs by 30,000 VND/ton, increasing rice revenue by over 500 billion VND annually. The added value of summer-autumn and autumn-winter rice crops due to reduced losses will reach approximately 6,000 billion VND.
Rice harvesting in the Mekong Delta. (Photo: Duy Khuong/VNA)
From now until 2020, provinces will equip themselves with an additional 20,000-25,000 combine harvesters and rice dryers, ensuring the mechanization of harvesting and drying processes for at least 80% of rice-growing land. From now until 2015, provinces will ensure that rice harvesting by machine reaches at least 50% of the land area.
By 2015, the Mekong Delta region had built an additional 70 modern drying systems, with a capacity of 10-30 tons of rice per hour, connected to export rice processing centers, ensuring the drying of 4 million tons of rice per year. Combined with the drying machines owned by farmers, this would ensure the drying of 80% of the annual summer-autumn and autumn-winter rice crop.
The storage capacity of the food storage system in the Mekong Delta is also being increased to 3.98 million tons. The storage system is being built at 52 locations across 13 provinces and cities in the Mekong Delta region and Ho Chi Minh City.
Upon completion at the end of 2013, the warehouse system operated using a mechanized and automated mechanism to improve labor productivity and control technical parameters during storage. The level of mechanization reached 80%, with the remaining 20% being automated.
The upgrading and construction of the aforementioned warehouse system aims to ensure the storage and circulation of 10 million tons of rice per year in the Mekong Delta for a maximum period of 6 months, guaranteeing the purchase of all rice from farmers, reducing post-harvest losses, and improving the production efficiency of rice growers and processors/exporters.
To date, the mechanization of rice harvesting has covered approximately 800,000 hectares during the Winter-Spring crop season. While this is three times the amount in 2007, it only meets 51% of the demand for mechanization in the Winter-Spring rice harvesting sector in the Mekong Delta.
In the annual summer-autumn and autumn-winter rice seasons, because harvesting takes place during the rainy season, the fields are often muddy, limiting the operating range of the machines, so the area of rice harvested by machine is lower than in the winter-spring season.
For many years, the Mekong Delta has sown two rice crops annually, the Summer-Autumn and Autumn-Winter crops, covering 2.2-2.3 million hectares with a total harvest of 12-14 million tons per year. The amount of rice lost after harvest in these two crops is higher than in the Winter-Spring crop (because it is harvested during the rainy season), at a rate of 10-12% due to a lack of drying equipment.
According to (VNA) - VT
