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HA NOI -- Farmers in northern Viet Nam are racing against time to sow the last rice seeds for their winter-spring rice crop after a month of crippling cold weather as the agriculture ministry met to discuss ways to restore agricultural production.
This comes as Viet Nam committed to supply the Philippines with 1.5 million tons of rice this year to alleviate an expected rice shortage in the coming months except in case of natural disasters or unforeseen harvest loss.
Viet Nam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development has met to discuss ways to restore agricultural production for 1.2 million hectares of winter-spring rice crops after the damaging cold spell.
While low temperatures destroyed a total area of 150,000 hectares of rice and transplanted rice seedlings, around 10,000 hectares of transplanted rice seedlings have survived, director of the Ministry’s Cultivation Department Nguyen Tri Ngoc said.
Deputy Minister Bui Ba Bong urged local governments to send experts to paddy fields to guide farmers on how to cultivate their crops and protect them from the cold.
Another cold snap is predicted to hit Viet Nam’s northern provinces at the end of the week.
The recent period of extreme cold has also left tens of thousands of farmers in the north penniless, creating an urgent need for Ha Noi to take action by helping farmers buy agriculture insurance.
Farmers suffered an estimated loss of VND400 billion (US$250,000). Tens of thousands of livestock died and hundreds of thousands of hectares of crops were destroyed by the severe cold.
While 80 percent of the country’s population are farmers and agriculture production revenue generates 30 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP), only one percent of livestock and cropland are insured, according to Pham Dinh Trong, vice head of the Insurance Department of the Ministry of Finance.
The lack of agriculture insurance may be attributed both to the reluctance of insurance suppliers and the discouraged or dismissive attitudes of farmers.
"Many other countries have policies in place that help farmers buy insurance. In the Philippines, the state subsidizes 50 percent of insurance fees for farmers,” said Hoang Xuan Dieu, a senior official from Bao Viet Insurance Company.
“In our country, where natural disasters and bad weather frequently occur, I think the government has to take action in helping farmers to buy insurance instead of just providing aids for them when bad weather affects their crops," said Dieu.
Dang Kim Son, Director of the Agriculture and Rural Development Strategy and Policy Institute cited government’s shortsightedness even as recent losses in the agriculture sector pointed out the need for long term solutions.
"The government should gradually make changes in the policy to support farmers on the insurance issue," said Son. Viet Nam News-ANN
