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Higher farm mechanisation rate targeted
Equipping farms with equipment equal to at least 2hp per hectare by 2015 is among the measures recommended by experts at a meeting held in the city of the Mekong delta city of Can Tho to discuss the Government's ambitious mechanisation plan.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development has drawn up a plan which seeks to mechanise farming to increase productivity and minimise post-harvest losses and costs. The current mechanisation rate is only 1.16hp.
It also hopes to add value to agricultural products and improve their competitiveness at home and abroad.
Under the plan, by 2015 all seeds will be produced and 70 percent of the land be cultivated using machinery.
The use of machines in all farming processes like sowing, transplanting, harvesting, husking, and watering will be popularised, especially major crops like rice, sugarcane, maize, and coffee.
To discuss these goals, more than 200 officials from Government agencies and companies gathered at the Can Tho meeting held by the Ministry of Industry and Trade.
They urged domestic agricultural firms to co-operate with each other and cut production costs to supply farmers products at reasonable prices.
The conference also stressed the need for the Government to have more specific policies to encourage the domestic agricultural machinery industry.
The Government should also provide access to credit and tax breaks to those involved in production of parts for the farm equipment.
Delegates from firms urged the Government to erect technical barriers to keep out low-quality foreign agricultural machinery and equipment.
They said farmers should be given long-term bank loans to buy machinery.
The country now has more than 1,300 firms involved in the manufacture and trade of agricultural machinery and over 1,200 in repairs and maintenance.
At the meeting, Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Do Huu Hao said after more than five years of implementing a strategy to expand mechanisation, the domestic machinery industry had achieved some success in manufacturing and supplying agricultural machinery and equipment.
Many enterprises including the Viet Nam Engine and Agricultural Machinery Corporation and the Ha Noi Mechanical Engineering Company had made great efforts to modernise their technologies and diversify their designs, he said.
But despite such efforts, domestically made farm machinery had just 30 percent of the domestic market, he said.
Delegates told the meeting that though many Vietnamese agricultural machines were of better quality than imports from mainland China and second-hand Japanese products, they still could not compete with them.
Pricing was the biggest obstacle for them, they said, pointing out they were often 1.5 to 1.8 times the cost of similar imported machinery.
Doan Xuan Hoa, deputy director of the Department of Agro-Forestry Products Processing and Salt Industry, said though mechanisation had seen a strong rise in recent years, the average rate in Viet Nam was just 1.16hp compared to 4hp in Thailand, 4.2hp in South Korea and 6.6hp in China.
Most Vietnamese farmers still sow and harvest their lands with their hands.
According to the Viet Nam Institute of Agriculture Engineering and Post-harvest Technology, the Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta, the country's rice bowl, leads the country in the use of agricultural machinery.
But even here only 8.2 percent of the harvesting, one of the most important processes on the farm, is done by machinery. In central and northern provinces, the rate is much lower.
"Farmers lose thousands of dollars every year by not having machinery for harvesting the rice," Mai Thanh Phung, an expert at the National Agricultural and Fishing Extension Centre, said.
He explained that manual harvesting of a field that yields eight tonnes of rice resulted in an average loss of around 8 per cent while the rate using machinery was only 3 percent.
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