New development opportunities for Vietnams agriculture

The great achievements of the agricultural sector stand out in the proud success of the 35 years of Vietnam's Doi Moi.

As a country with the smallest arable land in the world, very low level of agricultural investment, heavily affected by climate change and extensive global competition in a short time, from the position of the importer, Vietnam has exported agricultural products to 180 territories, ranking 2nd in Southeast Asia and 15th in turnover worldwide.

Upon entering a new development stage, facing new opportunities and challenges, the role of the “maestro” of the whole industry becomes even more important. During the meeting with the Prime Minister on May 19th, the Ministry had summarized the situation and proposed many concise solutions.

Based on analyzing the current situation, especially weaknesses and difficulties, to find out the causes and propose appropriate solutions.

In the diagram above, three main current weaknesses of agricultural production can be seen: (i) Small-scale, distributed goods production; (ii) Low quality, efficiency, safety and hygiene; (iii) Unsustainable and unstable production. These weaknesses have led to a) Vietnam's agricultural slow growth and poor competitiveness; b) Low income and living conditions for farmers; c) Environmental pollution, ecological imbalance.

The three main weaknesses above derive from several objective and subjective causes.

Objective causes:

Two objective causes from the global perspective include the situations of climate change, natural disasters and complicated epidemics, and the fierce competition in parallel with the trend of trade protectionism in the market.

Two other objective problems are within the domestic scope. Firstly, resources (land, labor, capital...) are increasingly scarce and expensive due to competition with strongly developed non-agricultural economic sectors. Secondly, industries producing input, processing output agricultural products; logistics, preservation and processing industries and the transport system have received little attention and investment to serve agriculture.

Subjective causes:

Firstly, the organization of spontaneous production relations emerged with the main production unit still being smallholder farming households, struggling to connect with the market through an intermediary small business system, and the little investment of businesses is also small and fragmented;

Secondly, value chains for key goods are hardly formed due to weak linkages between areas, regions and ministries;

Thirdly, innovation, research and application of science and technology in agriculture are still weak, especially with high technology, digital technology, and environmental-friendly technology.

In order to realistically seize opportunities and overcome challenges in the new era, it is necessary to have a practical and effective approach to create breakthroughs for key problem groups, surpass the limited scope of resources and function, of a ministry/sector, of each officer’s term.

Regarding the global objective causes:

Form units and forces with sufficient capability and operating conditions to monitor forecasts and promptly inform about the situation, make recommendations to support decision-making for specific production and business individuals, then build a treatment model according to pre-calculated scenarios, cooperate with the public - private, central - local action forces, the MARD, domestic - international relevant ministries in an orderly manner.

Regarding the domestic objective causes:

Focus on solving by proposing to the Government specific projects on renewing the general growth model, developing regional planning, and developing strategies for the sector.

Come up with policies that use market mechanisms to regulate resources (land, capital, and labor first); coordinate with localities, sectors and factors to attract investment to the agricultural economy, showing Vietnam's agricultural advantages with the image of "the world's farm", "the world's kitchen"…

Regarding subjective causes:

Bring farmers to the "subject role" of the development process as the spirit of the Resolution "Three-farming" (renovation of production relations, development of farm economy and cooperative economy, organization of community).

Vietnam today, with a stronger position and strength, if the three breakthroughs (renewing the growth model, renewing economic thinking and renewing development theory) can be realized, Vietnam will certainly arouse the people's aspiration to rise up and mobilize the country's potential internal strength, take advantage of international opportunities to create the second wave of innovation, and create momentum for our country to overcome middle-income trap by 2045 as the goal set out during the 13th National Party Congress.