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Blackouts put fish business in poorhouse
Recurring blackouts have cut production at some Mekong Delta fisheries over 60 percent as the country’s power shortage continues to hinder development.
Nguyen Dinh Huan, deputy general director of the An Giang Fisheries Import and Export Joint Stock Company (Agifish), said production at the company’s cold store plants had been halted by power cuts many times over the past several days.
There are days when the company processes nearly 100 tons of tra catfish, only a third of its normal daily capacity, he said.
Large quantities of fish died before being processed for export, which the company then had to sell on the domestic market at a loss of VND10,000 per kilogram, he said.
Doan Toi, general director of Nam Viet Export Joint Stock Company in An Giang Province, said more than 10,000 workers at the company had lost 15 percent of their usual wages as the power outages had cut their working hours sharply.
“We understand that there’s a power shortage all over the country, but with our chronic outages lately, it’ll take a very long time before we can purchase and process all the fish breeders are producing,” he said.
Other fishery companies at the Tra Noc Industrial Zone in Can Tho City’s Binh Thuy District, the region’s economic hub, are complaining about the power cuts.
Nguyen Phuong, a manager of Thien Ma Company, said outages often lasted the whole day and tons of the company’s fish had been left to die without the electricity needed to cool their tanks.
“Power cuts have forced us to reduce production to 50-60 percent of our normal capacity,” he said.
“Thus, we cannot buy enough fish to fulfill our contracts with fish breeders,” he said.
The company had installed an electric generator, but the machine could only meet 80 percent of the firm’s electricity needs, he said.
Do Ngoc Tai, deputy general director of Kim Anh Seafood Processing Company, said his company in Soc Trang Province had begun running a dynamo generator that consumed some 200 liters of diesel fuel every hour and had driven electricity costs up three times higher than before the power problems.
In a recent proposal to Deputy Prime Minister Hoang Trung Hai, the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers asked that the government take urgent measures to ensure a sufficient power supply for Mekong Delta fisheries.
The Deputy Prime Minister then asked power suppliers to speed up the construction of electricity power plants and facilities to solve the problem.
Thanhnien
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