Before going to class today, I accidentally read this article:
http://dantri.com.vn/c20/s20-437594/noi-dan-chat-vat-dem-tien-vi-nhieu-qua.htm
It's about many farmers from ethnic groups living around Truong Son mountain has been becoming millionaire thanks to planting sắn (cassava) and directly sell their products to a private factory manufacturing Cassava powder.
Coincidently, in the early morning today, I watched a Vietnamese movie about major changes of a normal village in Vietnam after Doi Moi policy. In the movie, the experts from Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development of Vietnam spent a lot of time and effort to figure out which plant the farmers should cultivate in order to replace the domination of rice because there is the fact that plating rice only can not make the farmer get richer. They came to a brilliant idea that the villagers (in the movie) should change all of their rice crops to plant Sugar cane. At the meantime, the government would build Sugar factory near the village to buy farmers' sugar canes and produce sugar. It's consider as a "Win-Win" cooperation: the state-owned factory has sugar cane- the most important input to produce sugar and the farmers have money from selling cane for factory. Such a brilliant idea!!
However, contrary to result of Cassava farmers in the article, the Sugar cane farmers in the movie had many challenges. Due to corruption, the Sugar factory hadn't been finished on time while the farmers had already cleared all of their rice crop to wait for the sugar cane plants. Furthermore, the price of the Sugar cane was much lower than the price announced by the private factories and sate-owned factory took a very long time to pay money for the farmers that made everyone lose the trust to their authority and still poor people as they always are....
The article telling the REAL successful sample of changing cultivated plants making farmers become millionaires really brought me a different view point of Vietnamese agriculture. We can do much BETTER if we follow the right track, use our brilliant ideas and have hard-working and warm-hearted experts/ businessmen who aim at helping farmer escape from poverty and move to a sustainable development.
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