The country’s exports of agricultural, forestry and fishery products reached 4.19 billion USD in 2000, and soared to more than 12 billion USD in 2007, the first year after joining the world trade body.

The agricultural sector saw a sharp increase in export turnover in 2007 due to entry into the global market. Several commodities earned an export value of more than 1 billion USD.

They included coffee (1.7 billion USD), fisheries (3.6 billion USD), processed wood products (2.5 billion USD), rubber (1.4 billion USD) and rice (1.4 billion USD).

Agricultural officials says the sector still faces numerous challenges. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development says there are high production costs, a lack of an overall marketing strategy, insufficient raw materials and outdated technology.

The sugar industry is an example of an agricultural sub-sector using obsolete technology. Over the last decade, sugarcane productivity fell to as low as 55 tonnes per hecta per year, compared with 100 tonnes per hecta in developed countries.

Other challenges are in small-scale production and poor processing and preservation technology, which make Vietnamese farm produce uncompetitive in the world market because of their failure to meet quality, food hygiene and safety standards set by WTO regulations.

Another problem is that more than 90 percent of Vietnamese agricultural products have been exported in the form of raw materials or semiprocessed, resulting in low economic value.

Meanwhile, rich countries in the WTO community have maintained subsidies for their agricultural products and have created barriers against imported farm produce to protect their commodities.

Agricultural investment in recent years has been small and haphazard.

In the last five years, the total investment for agricultural development reached more than 113 trillion VND (7.06 billion USD), or 8.7 percent of the State’s total investment. However, that amount met only 17 percent of capital demand.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) capital also has remained modest. By June 2007, FDI flow into the agricultural sector was 1.9 billion USD, 6.33 percent of total foreign investment.

Rural areas still lag far behind urban areas in social and economic development. Farmers’ living conditions remain low, the rural environment has become heavily polluted and the gap between the rich and the poor, urban and rural areas, has widened drastically.

To properly integrate into the WTO, ministry officials stressed, the agricultural industry has to be restructured to increase economic efficiency.

Major efforts in planning agriculture production and further investment in developing farm production, processing and quality are essential to ensure Vietnamese farm products are attractive in the global market.

Source: VNA