Thuy Dung
The seminar was organized in the context that tra fish as the local major product holding a global market share of over 90% has been mired in troubles since 2008, with a series of companies being on the verge of bankruptcy and farmers abandoning their farming areas.
The Vietnamese catfish is a strategic seafood product for exports. The fish was seen as a breakthrough phenomenon in the country when its average farming productivity reached up to 500 tons a hectare between 2000 and 2012. Meanwhile, the total yield was 1.3 million tons, export products exceeded 600,000 tons and export value amounted to US$1.8 billion a year in the same period.
Furthermore, the tra fish industry only uses a small area for farming, at some 6,000 hectares equivalent to only 1% of total shrimp farming area and has high competitiveness without requiring State investments. The industry creates jobs for more than 300,000 workers, contributing to changing the nation’s economic structure, especially in rural areas in the Mekong Delta.
However, after the period of such strong growth, the tra fish industry has been facing many difficulties since 2008, resulting in a slowdown in production and exports.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, tra fish farming area only totaled about 5,600 hectares in this year’s January-October, down 13% over the same period in 2012. Similarly, the tra fish yield volume only posted 732,000 tons in the ten-month period, dipping 11% year-on-year.
The prestige of Vietnamese tra fish products’ quality in many foreign markets has been hurt seriously, with the ratio of the added value of the products staying low, at less than 1% of the total tra fish export value.
Nguyen Huu Dung, vice chairman of the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP), noted tra fish farmers and enterprises had been experiencing a really tough period, with numerous businesses facing the threat of bankruptcy while farmers have left their farming areas abandoned.
These difficulties are seen right in the EU as the major importer of Vietnam’s tra fish. Tra fish exports to the EU have constantly fallen, from US$581 million in 2008 to US$425 million only in 2012, decreasing over 5% annually on average and up to 18.8% last year, the agriculture ministry reports.
To stabilize and manage tra fish farming in a much more effective way, Dung insisted that tra fish farming, processing and exporting activities must be treated as conditional business.
Besides, to minimize the demand-supply imbalance given the lack of a connection between material production and processing, exports and consumption, VASEP suggests applying the quota mechanism to tra fish farming. To do so, the agriculture ministry needs to work with provincial governments annually to set the quotas of tra fish farming volume for every province, and the quotas will then be allocated to every farming area in line with their natural conditions and capacity, according to the association.
Đăng ký: VietNam News