Nghe An National Assembly Delegation discusses draft Law on Cooperatives (amended) and Law on Civil Defense

Overview of the discussion session on the afternoon of November 1 at Group 16. Photo: Thu Nguyen

NEED TO UNIFY THE FOCUS FOR DIRECTING CIVIL DEFENSE ACTIVITIES

Regarding the Civil Defense Law project, delegate Vo Thi Minh Sinh - Member of the Provincial Party Standing Committee, Chairman of the Vietnam Fatherland Front Committee of Nghe An province highly agreed on the necessity of developing and promulgating this law to create the most common legal framework for preventing, combating, and overcoming the consequences of war; disasters, incidents, natural disasters, epidemics, and to best protect the lives, health, and property of the people.

Delegate Vo Thi Minh Sinh speaks at the discussion. Photo: VNA

To complete the draft Law, delegate Vo Thi Minh Sinh proposed to innovate the organizational structure, management and direction in civil defense work from the central to local levels on the basis of unifying a focal point and clearly assigning and decentralizing tasks, "clear people, clear work, clear responsibilities", avoiding duplication, overlap and confusion in the process of organizing the implementation of tasks related to civil defense, ensuring the motto "4 on-site".

Delegate Tran Duc Thuan speaks at the discussion. Photo: VNA

Also related to the Civil Defense Law project, Major General Tran Duc Thuan - Standing Member of the National Assembly's Defense and Security Committee, delegate of Nghe An Delegation basically agreed with the structure. However, there are still many technical legislative contents that, according to him, need to be revised to avoid overlapping with other laws, ensuring effectiveness when implemented.

CONCERNS ABOUT MINIMUM NUMBER OF MEMBERSCOOPERATIVE

Regarding the draft revised Law on Cooperatives, delegate of Nghe An Delegation Thai Van Thanh - Member of the Provincial Party Executive Committee, Director of the Department of Education and Training highly appreciated the necessity of promulgating the revised Law on Cooperatives to meet the requirements; as well as agreeing with the renaming of the Law on Cooperatives to the Law on Cooperative Economic Organizations, in order to cover all elements such as: Cooperative groups, federations, and cooperative unions. Along with that, delegate Thai Van Thanh also expressed his opinions related to some contents of the draft law such as: Credit activities; Government support policies;...

Delegate Thai Thi An Chung speaks at the discussion. Photo: Ho Long

Regarding the number of cooperative members, delegate Thai Thi An Chung - Member of the Provincial Party Committee, Deputy Head of the National Assembly Delegation of Nghe An said that the Law needs to clearly distinguish between non-agricultural and agricultural cooperatives. If it is a non-agricultural cooperative, the regulation as in the draft, that is, a minimum of 5 members may be appropriate, but for agricultural cooperatives, it needs to be reconsidered, possibly increasing to a minimum of 20 or 30 members.

Ms. An Chung also proposed to increase the rate of setting aside undistributed common funds from the profits from external transactions of cooperative economic organizations with legal status from a minimum of 5% as in the draft to 10% to ensure reserve funds for cooperatives, especially agricultural cooperatives because they are often affected by natural disasters and the impact of prices of materials and agricultural products; thereby creating conditions for cooperatives to develop.

Secretary of the Provincial Party Committee, Head of the National Assembly Delegation of Nghe An concluded the discussion session. Photo: Ho Long

Speaking at the discussion on the issue of cooperative support funds, Mr. Tran Nhat Minh - full-time delegate of Nghe An Delegation requested the drafting agency to specify more clearly the source of fund formation and the role and functions of the fund to avoid overlaps and duplications with the Cooperative Bank and People's Credit Funds; at the same time, requested the draft Law to clearly specify the agency managing this type of fund.

Mr. Tran Nhat Minh also requested the drafting agency to analyze and clearly explain the amendment of the regulation that each cooperative has a minimum of 7 members according to the current law down to a minimum of 5 members as in the draft amended Law.

Delegates at the discussion session of Group 16. Photo: Ho Long

The viewpoint of the delegate of Nghe An Delegation is that it is appropriate not to reduce the number of members, but to keep it as the current law. Because if the minimum number of members is 5, it will only create conditions for the establishment of cooperatives, but on the contrary, it will increase the rate of micro-cooperatives, not encouraging cooperatives to reduce members and increase the scale of operations.