Agriculture: Time to find your way home!

Agriculture: It’s time to find your way home!

As the Vietnamese are counting down to welcome the new year with the world, At the northern border gates, there are more than 5,000 containers of agricultural products still waiting to enter the Chinese market.

With tens of thousands, even hundreds of Thousands of Vietnamese farming families, the festive atmosphere to welcome the New Year is probably still far away, instead there is anxiety, not only for the fate of thousands of containers of agricultural products at the border gate area, but a whole crop failure is looming.

China is a huge market for agricultural products, but also full of uncertainties. The sad thing is that many agricultural products of Vietnam depend almost entirely on this uncertain output, sometimes not only for market reasons, but also for other unusual reasons. . Traffic jam “to” China means that the agricultural products of hundreds of thousands of farming families will also block the output.

For decades, we have known that about As long as Vietnamese agricultural products still go straight from the field to the table of Chinese consumers, farmers still have to live in anxiety.

Turning agricultural products is the path of sustainable development, the best solution to stabilize output for agricultural products. Everyone knows this, but why can’t Vietnam do it?

Many people think that Vietnam’s agricultural product processing industry is still underdeveloped, and that investment is needed to promote this industry to develop as a base for the output of farmers’ goods. But this is not necessarily true, because every year, Vietnam’s processing industry still has to spend tens of billions of dollars to import raw agricultural products.

According to statistics According to the General Department of Customs, from the beginning of the year to December 15, 2021, Vietnamese businesses have spent nearly 13 billion dollars to import cashew nuts, corn, soybeans and animal feed ingredients. In terms of quantity, only three types of cashew nuts, corn and soybeans have reached nearly 14.5 million tons.

Some of the above figures are enough to show no Vietnam’s processing industry is not big enough to “carry” the responsibility of consuming agricultural products for farmers, but even the demand for raw materials of this industry is sometimes even greater than the supply capacity of domestic agricultural sector. Therefore, the problem of Vietnam’s agricultural industry is not the lack of market but the inability to produce what the market needs.

This paradox must be that the Government as well as the leaders Vietnamese agricultural leaders and farmers know. The difficulty is that the cost of domestic agricultural products is too high. From the data of the General Department of Customs, it can be calculated that the average price of corn imported to Vietnam in the past year was only $286/ton, similar to the price of soybeans at $584 and cashew nuts $1,483/ton. .

Obviously, with such a “good” import price, Vietnamese farmers are required to switch to growing corn, soybeans or expanding cashew orchards… to compete. with imported agricultural products to supply raw materials for the domestic processing industry is unthinkable.

So that the agricultural industry can gradually find the domestic market, avoiding dependence If everything is to be invested in a large but precarious market like China, it is impossible without the intervention of the State. First of all, it is necessary to invest more heavily in research on plant varieties and farming techniques to improve productivity and quality of agricultural products; research and develop agricultural products capable of gradually replacing imported raw materials for animal feed; and finally the policy is strong enough to encourage processing enterprises to use domestic agricultural products as input materials instead of imported goods.

Surely this is an article. difficult math, can’t find the answer overnight. But if the State really wants to help farmers get out of the precarious situation, then take action now, so that we still have hope that in the next 5 or 10 years Vietnam’s agriculture will grow. than. Otherwise, farmers will forever depend on uncertainties outside, while the large and stable domestic market is just out of reach.

Tan Duc

TBKTSG