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VietNamNet Bridge – Though Vietnam is an agricultural country with 70 percent of its population living in rural areas, agriculture insurance has not developed. Phung Dac Loc, Secretary General of the Vietnam Insurance Association, talks about the issue.

Thoi Bao Kinh Te Saigon: Could you please tell us about the proportion of agriculture insurance in the non-life insurance sector in Vietnam?

Phung Dac Loc: Agriculture insurance premiums in Vietnam are inconsiderable compared with total non-life insurance premiums. The premiums in 2009 were modest at 1.7 billion dong, while total non-life insurance premiums were 13,644 billion dong. The figure was 958 million dong in the first half of 2010 vs. 8241 billion dong.

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In what is being described as a landmark case, a Taiwanese owned manufacturer has made an out of court settlement with thousands of Vietnamese farmers who claim pollution caused by the firm significantly effected their livelihoods.

Vedan Vietnam, which makes food additives including monosodium glutamate (known as MSG), reportedly discharged waste water in such quantities into the local river that it killed the ecosystem. Thousands of fish and shrimp farmers claimed the toxic waters killed their catch and ruined farmland along the river’s banks. Vedan has admitted responsibility and offered compensation worth US$11.5 million to farmers in three provinces.

Presenter: Bo Hill
Speakers: Huang, Vietnam Farmers Union; Le Viet Hung, director, Natural Resources and Environment Department, Dong Nai, Vietnam

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VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnamese coffee producers apply different standards that are not applied throughout the world. As a result, Vietnamese coffee exporters suffer from a competitive disadvantage in the world market.

Numerous meetings and workshops discussing Vietnamese coffee standards on coffee export products have been organized over the last ten years. However, the problems still persist.

The Vietnam Coffee and Cocoa Association (Vicofa) has just organized one more workshop on the issue. The association once again called for the application of international standards for coffee exports.

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HA NOI — Rice exporters are facing difficulties negotiating export prices due to domestic rice price increases, said the Viet Nam Food Association.

The association said this increase had made farmers happy but brought concerns to exporters. The exporters would have more difficulty in confirming export contracts because they could not compete with rival countries.

Over the last two weeks, rice prices have risen by VND500-1,000 per kilo to VND4,100-4,400 for low-quality rice, VND4,800 per kilo for medium-quality rice, and VND5,500 per kilo for high-quality rice.

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Each year, Vietnam produces 180,000 tonnes of tea including 130,000 tonnes for export, earning US$79 million. Currently, it ranks fifth in the world in both production and export volume.

Over the past 15 years, the tea sector has surpassed its set targets for cultivated acreage, productivity and export volume. But export tea prices are lower than those in other countries such as India, Sri Lanka, and Kenya.

Vietnam has a total area of 120,000 hectares of tea grown in 34 provinces, mostly in the northern mountainous and central highland regions.

In 2009, the average price of tea in those countries was US$2.43 per kilo while Vietnamese tea stood at US$1.23 per kilo.

Between 1998 and this year, the world’s average tea price increased by 18 percent while Vietnam’s tea price fell by 20 percent.

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HCM CITY — Viet Nam should restructure its livestock industry by applying lessons learnt from other countries, an expert has said.

“Global consumption of meat, milk and eggs is increasing, with greatest increase in South and Southeast Asian countries,” Andrew Speedy, representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, told a conference on livestock industry outlook in HCM City last week.

As Viet Nam’s population would rise from 86 million to 126 million by 2050, demand for pork and poultry was projected to rise from 2.3 million to 3.4 million tonnes and 415,000 to 610,000 tonnes respectively, Speedy said.

To meet the increasing demand, Viet Nam must enhance livestock production by encouraging investment in industrial poultry production, he said.

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Nhan Dan – The adverse impact by the global economic crisis in 2009 had been made on the whole economy of Vietnam and gone deep in every corner of the rural areas to every farmer’s family, according to the survey result by the Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agricultural and Rural Development.

As for the cultivation industry, with the maximal efforts by the authorities at all levels and farmers, the area nationwide under cultivation was not reduced and corn and rice productivity increased, but due to the sharp increase in prices of input materials whereas the prices of products did not rise of if any, it did not match with the increase in input cost, resulting in considerable decrease in profit. The survey made among households in Bac Can province showed that profit from rice production reduced by 8 – 20% according to the number of members each household had. In Nam Dinh, the fairly well-off households’ rice production cost was up 40.1%, whereas their profit was down 31.2%.

The animal husbandry and fishery sector had faced even bigger difficulties in 2009. It is because of the fact that prices of petroleum increased so high whereas prices of shrimps and fish were not high enough, or if any, it did not rise as required, so thousands of offshore fishing ships had to be stranded on shore. Especially, a state of affairs had cropped up that the area under aquaculture in a lot of localities had been abandoned.

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VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnamese rice exporters will not be significantly affected by the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement (AFTA), which zeroed out tariff on exports among six member countries of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), effective on January 1 2010, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD).

The tariff reduction will not have much impact on Vietnamese rice production and trading as the countries does not have many rice export contracts with ASEAN countries, except for the Philippines, said deputy head of MARD’s Institute of Agriculture and Rural Development Policy and strategy.

Five other ASEAN member, including Vietnam, would apply the zero tax rates on the other members in 2015.

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The adverse impacts of climate change on the Mekong Delta in Vietnam will be amplified several times if hydropower dams planned upstream by other countries are built, experts say.

Both local and international experts said at a forum on the Mekong River environment organized by the Can Tho University on Wednesday that the dams will seriously threaten food security in riparian countries.

Dao Trong Tu, former Vietnam country coordinator for the Mekong River Commission, said three hydropower dams are already under construction in China, and another 11 were planned in Laos and Cambodia.

La Chhuon, an expert of Oxfam Australia in Cambodia, said fishermen in the country had told him they wanted to eat fish and would not be able to eat electricity generated by hydropower dams.

Read the full story at Thanh Nien News

VietNamNet Bridge – Although Vietnam is one of the three largest rice exporters in the world, its rice prices are lower than Thailand’s. Experts say Vietnamese rice has no brand name and its quality is inconsistent.

In the domestic market, branded rice on supermarket shelves is 20 percent more expensive than that offered at street kiosks. To increase rice prices, experts say Vietnam needs to build a brand name for its rice in line with international standards.

Richard Moore, a well-known brand expert, says producers need to pour more investment into marketing, packaging and trading services if they want to increase their rice prices. He cites Thailand as a role model in building a brand name for its rice. It tops the list of global rice exporters and its prices are higher than Vietnam’s.

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