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Ben Tre leaning on agriculture for growth
Ben Tre Province in the Mekong Delta is working on a plan to bring it out of the shadows and into the light of economic development. At a recent meeting to discuss the blueprint till 2020, provincial policy-makers pushed to continue building through agriculture and then tourism as a secondary supporting industry.
At the August 21 meeting, delegates forwarded ideas on how to grow higher cash-return crops such as cocoa, rice and coconut while spending more on transportation links to neighboring provinces and Ho Chi Minh City, some 120km away.
Historically, Ben Tre – the easternmost Mekong Delta province, which has a long coastline bordering the East Sea – has been cut off from its neighbors by large Mekong River tributaries. The Mekong, which begins its journey in the upper Tibetan plateau, eventually splits into nine rivers before discharging itself in the East Sea.
But its isolation has been scaled back recently following the opening of the Rach Mieu bridge connecting My Tho of Tien Giang province in January.
The government has also approved a plan to build major new bridges over the Ham Luong and Co Chien rivers on national highway 60 running through the locality.
Going nutty over coconuts
The province has long been famous for cultivating coconut, a staple in the area and often found in residential gardens.
Ben Tre has 45,000 hectares of coconut trees, making it the largest coconut grower in the Mekong Delta. Over 30 food products and souvenirs are produced from it, providing jobs for an army of local workers.
Like most of the world, Ben Tre loves chocolate too, or at the very least, the woody bean that produces it.
Cocoa is another promising cash-crop, which has undergone test planting over the last decade. Cocoa trees produce fruit in 50 years, so a long term approach to planning is needed to get it right.
From the 4,000 hectares of cocoa in the province now, authorities plan to bump that number to 30,000 by 2020.
The first plant to process the bean will cost US$37 million and will be built next year.
Backer, Vinacacao Holding Company, said the plant will need 11,000 tons of cocoa bean a year to get things going.
Besides Vinacacao, Masterfoods, U.S.-based Cargil, Mitsubishi, Grand Place of France and Armajaro of Malaysia have set up cocoa buying stations in the area.
A side benefit from choosing the two crops is that they can be grown together.
A hectare of coconut and cocoa trees brings in an annual profit of VND70 million ($4,000), $2,800 of which comes from cocoa; according to a survey by the Ben Tre Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.
That doubles what rice crops bring in.
Vinacacao firm director, Tran Van Lieng said the area should manage well in the global marketplace as research suggests conditions are better than in leading exporting countries Ghana, Indonesia and Ivory Coast.
Tourism to ensue
Foregoing the big push to industrialize with low-end manufacturing centers that many rural provinces are relying on, Ben Tre hopes that having agriculture as a base will provide plenty of opportunities to develop tourism, said Doctor Pham Thi Ngoc My, principle of the Finance and Marketing College.
With 6,000 km of rivers, canals, streams and estuaries, all that’s needed now are the new resorts to dot the rivers and the coast for tourism to get the shot in the arm it badly needs, she added.
Ben Tre Province has a population of 1.5 million with average GDP per capita in 2008 of $550 per year, or just half of neighboring Can Tho City.
Van Truong
vietnews
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