2:37:21 PM | 9/11/2005
Targeting agricultural production as its main potential, Soc Trang has made use of its land and water surfaces in order to boost its agricultural economy in accordance with others in the Mekong Delta region. Thanks to this, the province has gained an annual significant growth rate of 7.67% in agriculture in the 2001-2005 period.
Soc Trang province has an agricultural economy with more than 85% of its population relying on farming and nearly 81.73% of its total natural land suitable for agriculture production. In addition, the province has several favourable conditions to fully develop its agriculture production thanks to a diversified ecosystem and fertile land. Tapping such above-mentioned potentials has, however, taken out a lot of investment and joint effort.
Over the years, Soc Trang province has paid a due attention to irrigation infrastructure with such large-scale projects such as 53,000-ha Ke Sach project, 41,300-ha Ba Rinh – Ta Liem project, 53,500-ha Long Phu – Tiep Nhat project, 73,000-ha Quan Lo – Phung Hiep project, 23,200-ha Thanh My project, 29,200-ha Cu Lao project, 46,800 coastal East Sea project, and others to prevent salinity encroachment and to boost intensive farming.
In addition, the province has also conducted other projects on irrigation-transport linkage, electricity transmission in rural areas, science and technology development, agriculture promotion, and animal and plant protection. The total budget for irrigation and agro-forestry production was estimated at more than VND1 trillion the 2001-2005 period. Priorities have been also given to processing industry, providing agricultural production chances for further overall development.
The province’s agriculture sector has focused on putting research into operation and transferring technology in agriculture, forestry, and industrial promotion over the recent years. The move has helped local farmers shift into cultivating newly-created paddy varieties and high-yield sugarcane strains and breeding sind cows. The sector has also successfully carried out several agriculture and forestry promotion models such as VAC (Garden-Pond-Coop)
Apart from technology and technical application into production, the local agriculture sector has also paid attention to international cooperation. The sector is now conducting many large-scale projects: ADB-funded rural infrastructure development project, World Bank-funded irrigation development project, and other DANIDA-funded projects including IPM components, seedlings and saplings componenst, and post-harvest components. These projects have strongly benefited the local forestry and agriculture production and rural development despite not receiving much investment.
The agriculture sector will continue transferring its domestic animal and cropland structure between 2006 and 2010 in order to attain an annual average production value of at least VND50 million from each hectare under cultivation and create a close relation between production and preservation as well as processing and consumption.
Hòa Bình
Vietnamese
