Taiwanese firms boost agricultural partnership with Vietnam

Farming vegetables in a net house (Photo: VNA)

Hanoi (VNA) – Businesses from Taiwan (China) have signed several agreements on agricultural cooperation with the Vietnam Organic Agri-Economy Institute after recent fact-finding trips to Tay Ninh, Dong Thap and Lam Dong provinces.

Nguyen Ngoc Bao, Chairman of the Vietnam Cooperative Alliance (VCA), said under the deals, the two sides will transfer technologies of crossbreeding and producing plant and animal varieties that match the soil, climate and manpower conditions in Vietnam.

They will work together to help local agricultural cooperatives apply high technologies in a bid to develop value chains in agricultural production. The Taiwanese firms will also assist in manpower training, exchange of experts and support for agriculture-based start-ups.

Notably, a programme on developing the start-up ecosystem in Vietnam’s rural areas will be developed. This programme aims to assist young people to start their careers in agriculture and in their hometowns in rural areas, Bao noted.

Van Thinh Phat Group and some partners have mobilised 200 billion VND (8.7 million USD) to fund the first phase of the programme, whose coordinating board and some other businesses, including Sunny World Investment and Development Corporation and Saigon Commercial Bank, will continue calling for investment in this programme.

Beneficiaries are young people with disadvantages who have feasible capital use plans and production-business ideas but lack funding. The programme will also finance part of the capital for extremely poor families.

Bao said Vietnam is facing a shortage of young workforce for cooperatives, so it is necessary to learn from Taiwan’s agricultural start-up experience in the programme.

This is a solution helping to strongly develop Vietnam’s agriculture and reach the target of having over 35,000 cooperatives, including 15,000 agricultural ones, by 2020, he added.