Facilitating the restoration of agricultural production

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Raft fish farmers in Dinh Quan District hope the customers would have the huge demand of their products. Photo by P.A.

From the central to local levels, all efforts have been made to create favorable conditions in order to support for the enterprises and farmers to maintain and restore their production and business activities in the context of the complicated situation of the epidemic.

Solving difficulties in the goods circulation

According to the reflection from the enterprises, farm owners and farmers, the biggest difficulty at present is the transportation and circulation of agricultural products. This is also the reason why many production areas have the stagnant situation of agricultural products and cannot be consumed even though the selling price is much lower than the production cost. Meanwhile, the consumers, especially the people in big urban areas, even though they must pay high prices, they cannot buy the fresh food such as meat, vegetables and fruits. Especially, in the production areas located in the lockdown zones, the traders stop purchasing to make fruits and vegetables be congested in the fields, causing the farmers to lose billions of VND. 

According to Mr. Le Van Quyet, Vice Chairman of the Southeast Poultry Breeding Association: "The livestock sector is facing a lot of difficulties and needs a lot of support to revive, but in reality, it is being "executed" too much. For example, a special-purposed bran truck, it is impossible to transfer the goods to other vehicles at the checkpoints. While the vehicle carrying supplies is a few hundred meters away from the guard station and the vehicle cannot enter the right location due to transferring the goods to other vehicles at the checkpoints. There is even a situation where the goods are being shipped, but until the curfew at 18:00, so they have to stop and wait until 6:00 of the next day to continue to deliver the goods. Although there is a regulation that every road is a green channel and every goods is an essential item, the statement of "the king's permission to lose to the village rules" is occurring. The empty vehicle cannot go to the farms to catch breeding chickens because there are no goods in the vehicle. With the same farm system, however, the technical employees from a farm to another, they could not pass though the checkpoints between two areas wheter complying with the principle of “1 route, 2 stops”. Recently, a number of slaughterhouses with the F0 cases had to stop working, so the crowded number of chickens and pigs in the barn could not be consumed because of the disruption at the slaughtering stage.

Talking about the problems in transporting the agricultural products, the Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Phung Duc Tien cited that Many agricultural products with large outputs have been stuck at harvest time due to supply chain disruptions. In particular, many enterprises, processing and trading businesses of agricultural products, especially aquatic products, have had to stop their operations or reduce their operating capacity due to the impact of the Covid-19 epidemic.  

Pointing out the machinerily applying of the localities in the epidemic prevention and control which has caused to the congested goods circulation situation, the Deputy Prime Minister of the Government Le Van Thanh cited that the truck carrying hundreds of pigs and thousands of chickens must transfer them to other trucks, the enterprises would not continue their operations. Some localities are so rigid to the extent that trucks carrying breeders to re-herd are also not allowed to enter. It is suggested that localities must ensure smooth circulation of goods without other types of "sub-permits", there must agree to only check the permits at the starting and ending points. Especially, it is necessary to abolish the requirement to transfer the goods to other vehicles, which causes the time-wasting and congestion in the circulation of goods. From the central to local levels, the epidemic prevention and control is identified as the most important task in order to serve as the foundation for production recovery.

It is difficult to transport bananas to the export market. Photo by P.A 

The supply chain has been stagnated

Also according to the Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Phung Duc Tien, the big difficulty is that input costs from transportation fees to prices of animal feeds, fertilizers and pesticides have all increased at the record levels, and storage costs and many other items have also increased. Even the enterprises that stop their production still have to bear a lot of different costs. Meanwhile, the prices of many agricultural products have fallen sharply, causing the trade activities to decrease in both volume and value. The products are sold at only 30% of production costs.  

From rice to fruits, livestock and aquatic products, both domestic consumption and export are difficult at all. The output is congested, the farmers are lack of capital to buy materials and machines for their production, so they are not interested in producing the next crop and are not eligible for reinvestment. It is forecasted that the production of rice, vegetables and fruit trees in the last months of 2021 and early 2022 is not guaranteed and is likely to be in short supply, if there is no timely solution.

In the livestock sector, there are also bottlenecks and incur its high input costs while its output is constantly shrinking because of the temporarily closed collective kitchens, cafeterias and restaurants. Many slaughtering plants have to close, the livestock farms reduce the munber of herds and stop re-herding due to the low consumption prices and the rising input prices. The risk of a lack of the domestic food supply is likely to arise, especially during the 2022 Lunar New Year.

Mr. Le Van Quang, General Director of the Minh Phu Seafood Corporation, a leading shrimp exporter in Vietnam (Ca Mau Province) representing the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers, shared the The South of Vietnam is the key shrimp production area of ​​the country. The Covid-19 epidemic made the shrimp supply chain almost be disrupted, from production to processing and export, facing the difficulties. The processing enterprises can only produce 25 - 30% of capacity, leading to a reduction in shrimp prices by 20 - 30%. In production, lack of the supply of breeding, input materials causing the situation where shrimp cannot be harvested and transported the shrimp for consumption, so there is a situation of dead shrimp in ponds. The shrimp farmers do not release seed, the risk of shortage of shrimp supply already exists. The processing industry is also worried about the lack of processing materials in the coming time. 

Phan Anh

According to Mr. Tran Lam Sinh, Deputy Director of the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development of Dong Nai province, over the past time, the whole province has 121 enterprises, businesses and agricultural products that have requested to connect and support because the output is difficult. In which, 17 units have registered to be supported to consume tens of tons of agricultural products of all kinds. But in the localities, there are still hundreds of tons of vegetables, fruits, fish, aquatic products, etc. needing to support consumption.