Agricultural mechanization will help improve the value of farm produce and competitive pricing, according to the Mekong Delta Development Research Institute (MDI).
The Mekong Delta Development Research Institute (MDI) said that, each year, farmers have to suffer from losses of post-harvest activities worth VND3,200-3,600 billion. Therefore, agricultural mechanization is an urgent need in the region. However, the process of agricultural mechanization remains slow, leading to the low competitiveness of rice.
Real situation
According to the MDI, the Mekong Delta region has more than 42,100 threshers, 2,793 harvesters and 600 combine harvesters. The process of agricultural mechanization in the region remains unsynchronized. According to a recent survey by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, harvesters have only taken on 1 percent of the rice field areas in the region. Farmers mainly harvest rice by hand, leading to an increase in the market price and huge losses in harvest and post-harvest activities.
Dr Le Van Banh, head of the MDI said that the situation is attributed to poor infrastructure in rural areas. In addition, rice fields have been divided randomly, leading to difficulties in introducing mechanization into the agricultural sector.
The Mekong Delta region is considered as the largest granary in the country. However, the region does not yet have an agricultural university, existing human resources cannot meet the demand for agricultural development in the region.
The region now has many enterprises which produce combine harvesters. However, there are no agricultural mechanical engineers working for these establishments. Therefore, the combine harvesters produced are not technologically sound.
90 percent out of some 1,800 combine harvesters in the region are imported from China. According to MARD’s guideline for speeding up the process of agricultural mechanization, the region needs many combine harvesters in future. At that time, production establishments in the region will fail to be competitive right on their own turf.
According to Dr. Phan Hieu Hien from the HCM City University of Agro-Forestry, shortcomings in agricultural mechanisation in the Mekong Delta region were identified ten years ago, but they have not yet been resolved.
In the previous tens years, farmers handled both rice production and post-harvest preservation. Today farmers still follow this method to preserve their paddy, using outdated and inadequate techniques. In contrast, businesses, who have sufficient storage space, technology and capital, only participate in rice preservation and transport to seaports for export. At present, the rice trading system cannot properly manage the rice preservation process, thus diminishing the post-harvest rice output and reducing the quality of rice. Dr, Hien said.
Specific strategies are needed
Currently, agricultural mechanisation is not fully applied in the Mekong Delta region due to local farmer’s amtiquated methods of agricultural production and their limited knowledge of how to use machines. About 85 percent of local farmers still use traditional cultivation techniques.
In addition, the price of harvesters is rather high, about VND150-VND200 million/unit, so farmers with a small area of rice cultivation and low income are not able to purchase them.
Agricultural mechanisation has become an urgent task of the Mekong Delta region, with the aim of reducing the rice production cost and offsetting the chronic lack of workers during harvest time. It is estimated that a combine harvester has a high productivity which is equivalent to that of more than 60 labourers, thereby cutting the production cost by over 30 percent.
In recent times, many provinces and cities have given incentive policies to help farmers implement agricultural mechanisation in their production activities, such as providing preferential loans and offering hire-purchase services. However, provincial and municipal capital sources are still limited while the capital disbursement time is short, therefore, few farmers can get these preferential loans. Furthermore, each area has its own way to promote agricultural mechanization, so many farmers do not respond to the programme.
Dr. Le Van Banh, head of the MDI, said that to develop the agricultural sector in line with modernization provinces and cities should have concrete strategies in agricultural and rural development and map out specific plans to effectively implement projects.
Many agricultural researchers stress that it is essential to have a clear strategy and strong financial support from the State in order to help farmers in the Mekong Delta speed up the process of agricultural mechanisation.
Source: VOV