Long An (VNA) –
The provinces of Long An and Dong Nai have been unable to use high-quality
research findings to boost agricultural development because they lack funds and
are unable to match what farmers want, officials said.
Dinh Thi Phuong Khanh, Deputy
Director of the Long An Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, said
farmers needed technical support obtained from scientific research that they
can apply in production.
Many scientific projects
have produced approved, high-quality results that can help farmers, but few
have been applied in practice, she said.
By last year, her office
had received 16 scientific research results from the Department of Science and
Technology for application on the field.
Khanh said her office has
asked district and commune authorities to apply the research findings to boost
agricultural development, and 14 projects have been registered to do so.
However, only one project has received financial support.
“A project to commercially
breed catfish in Thanh Hoa district was the only one that received 190 million
VND (8,360 USD). The remaining projects are still on the waiting list, because
the Department of Science and Technology has not been able to allocate funds,”
Khanh said.
Le Quoc Dung, Director of
the province’s Department of Science and Technology, agreed that funding
shortage was a big challenge. Without funding, scientific researches would
remain theories, he said.
Dung said the department
has been allocated just 10 billion VND (440,000 USD) for all scientific and
technological activities, so the maximum it could offer a project was 200
million VND (8,800 USD).
There are as many as 32
projects that have not yet been implemented, he added.
Scientific projects in Dong
Nai province have faced another problem: selling the produce once the findings
have been applied by farmers.
According to the provincial
Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, the local Centre for
Biotechnology Application has received the results of 30 scientific research
projects, but 16 of them remain on paper.
A project to expand Mokara
orchid gardens was carried out as the collaboration between the Dong Nai Centre
for Biotechnology Application and HCM City’s Biotechnology Centre in 2013.
Trial results were good.
Mokara orchid growers could earn more than 1.2 billion VND (52,800 USD) per
hectare from the second year onwards. However, the total area of orchid gardens
four years after the project began implementation was only four hectares or so.
Tran Vu, a farmer in Long
Khanh town, said he had visited the model of orchid planting at the centre and
decided not to invest in it.
Vu said the centre asked
farmers to invest more than 1 billion VND (44,000 USD) for each hectare of
orchids, but did not promise stable outlets.
Other projects, one to
raise buffaloes in Dong Thap Muoi and another to grow dragon fruits in Chau Thanh
district, have showed promise. However, the high cost of production and
uncertain markets were major barriers to implementing them on a larger scale.
Highlighting yet another
problem, Luong Thanh Trung, director of Dong Nai province’s Agriculture
Extension Centre, said farmers only wanted to plant crops with low production
cost and high selling prices. But most of the scientific research projects
focused on high-quality products, which increased production costs. This,
combined with the inability of authorized agencies to guarantee stable outlets,
made farmers reluctant to apply them.
Trung said among the
projects applied in practice over the past five years, the project with the
highest total area covered just a few dozen hectares.
Khanh of the Long An
agriculture department suggested scientific researches should be based on
specific requests.
For example, the department
would use its budget to ask the Department of Science and Technology to study
or research a certain project, and later, use agricultural extension funds for
applying them practice through training courses for officials and farmers in districts
and communes.
She said businesses could
also ask the Department of Science and Technology to conduct research projects,
the results of which could be bought for application in production.
This could help ensure that
scientific and technological research for agricultural development is practical
and efficient, she added.-VNA