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Vietnam’s strong farm production guarantees supply: UN agency
Vietnam is not short of food thanks to strong agricultural production, according to the country’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) representative Andrew Speedy.
Mr Speedy made the comments on the occasion of World Food Day (October 16) and the 30th anniversary of Vietnam-FAO cooperation at a conference in Hanoi on October 16.
However, he noted that the rise in food prices has led to increased vulnerability among specific population groups and regions, particularly the north-west and the Central Highlands, which have high poverty rates and poor nutrition and suffer from natural disasters resulting in crop failure.
He said the reduced purchasing power of all households, especially the poor, presented a substantial risk that households living above the poverty line would fall back below it. Poorer women and children are particularly at risk since higher food prices can worsen their already precarious nutrition status.
“In addition, the pressure on poor households to increase earnings impacts breast feeding, childcare, child labour, school attendance and out-of pocket health expenditures,” said Mr Speedy.
For his part, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Cao Duc Phat said that with more than 4 million hectares of rice and an average yield of about 5 tonnes per hectare per crop, rice production is estimated to climb to 38.5 million tonnes this year. The average food volume per capita is expected to increase to more than 580kg – the record figure.
However, the average food volume per capita varied among areas in 2007, reaching 1,075kg in the Mekong River Delta, but only 287kg in the central region. This has put many at risk of food shortage, especially when natural disasters and floods occurred.
“Farmers directly produce rice, but it is difficult to get rich from rice because the price is unstable, and agricultural production often suffers many risks,” said Mr Phat.
He said unstable prices do not affect food security, but cause difficulties in solving agricultural problems for people in mountainous and remote areas.
It is reported that north-western provinces reached an average food productivity of 421kg per capita per year in 2007, of which rice made up 217kg. In the Central Highlands region, it was 382kg per capita per year, of which rice accounted for 174kg. These figures show that many people in these areas eat rice mixed with other cereals including corn and potato.
According to Nguyen Tri Ngoc, director of the Cultivation Department, although Vietnam ranked as the second rice exporter in the world with about 4 million tonnes per year, the country is still at risk of unstable food security.
“The biggest challenge is the pressure of an increasing population, leading to a high demand for food,” said Mr Phat.
Meanwhile, he said agricultural land has been reducing. There were about 4.1 million hectares of rice in Vietnam, 360,000ha less than in 2000. In addition, the Mekong River Delta faced regular epidemics caused by brown hoppers, with an estimated loss of about 1 million tonnes of rice per year.
Vietnam has carried out many economic development programmes, including hunger eradication and poverty reduction in mountainous and remote areas, as well as increasing investment in irrigation systems and expanding areas for rice, corn, potato and cassava farming. The rate of poor households has fallen significantly, from 58 percent in 1993 to estimated 13.1 percent this year.
At the conference, Mr Speedy said that Vietnamese experts have introduced agricultural practices, rice production, pest management, horticulture, small-scale irrigation and aquaculture, helping to enhance agricultural production and farmers’ income in other countries. These host countries have expressed their appreciation for Vietnam’s contribution.
“This leads me to consider the changing role of the FAO in Vietnam. In the early days, the role could have reasonably been described as ‘aid’, this gradually transformed into ‘assistance’ as Vietnam became more self-sufficient, and increasingly this has become a relationship of ‘partnership’ in which we work with Vietnamese counterparts towards sustainable development,” said Mr Speedy.
He reminded Vietnam of the need to focus on poverty reduction in remote areas and areas inhabited by ethnic people.
To date, the UN organisation has helped Vietnam carry out around 400 projects on sustainable agriculture development, nutrition, food security, forestry and fishing. It has also closely cooperated with the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) to help the country prevent and effectively control bird flu outbreaks and overcome damage caused by natural disasters.
VOV
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