10,000 Mekong Delta households benefit from German-funded rice value chain project
Around 10,000 households in the Mekong Delta provinces of An Giang, Dong Thap and Bac Lieu and Can Tho city have received training on the adoption of sustainable rice-farming practices and rice quality improvement, as part of a project underway since 2018, heard a conference on September 21.
Harvesting summer-fall rice crops in Can Tho. (Photo: VNA)
Can Tho (VNA) – Around 10,000 households in theMekong Delta provinces of An Giang, Dong Thap and Bac Lieu and Can Tho city have receivedtraining on the adoption of sustainable rice-farming practices and rice quality improvement, as part of a project underway since 2018, heard a conference on September 21.
The conference took place in Can Tho to review the resultsof the project Better Rice Initiative Asia phase II (BRIA 2) – Market-orientedSmallholder Value Chains Project (MSVC), or MSVC-BRIA 2, aiming to promote SRPstandards for sustainable rice cultivation in the four localities.
It is a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) project implementedby the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) and Olam Agri Vietnam, in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD)’sDepartment of Cooperatives and Rural Development.
The project has enabled Vietnamese smallholder farmers tocut costs and increase earnings, and strengthened cooperation betweencooperatives and processors.
In several demonstration farms, farmers were able to reduce the useof water by up to 40% and of NPK ferilisers by 15% as they were taught to shiftfrom the traditional continuous flooding to alternate wetting-drying method and dripirrigation.
Under the project, some 150,000 tonnes of international-standardpremium-quality rice have been produced, creating a new opportunity to boostexport to the EU and US.
Vu Van Tien, deputy head of the Department of Cooperativesand Rural Development, highly spoke of the efforts by stakeholders indeveloping a comprehensive set of measures, from cultivation techniques tomarket access, to improve quality of Vietnamese farm produce. What have learntfrom the project will support regulators in building policies for betterlinkages between producers and distributors, he said.
He further noted that the MARD has approved a pilot projectto develop a standardised agricultural and forestry region for both domesticconsumption and export in the 2022 – 2025 period.
The ministry is also crafting a project to grow 1 millionhectares of premium-quality rice to heighten earnings for farmers, ensure nationalfood security and boost exports, the official added./.
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Harvesting summer-fall rice crops in Can Tho. (Photo: VNA)
