Farmer Nguyen Nam chops down hundreds of papaya trees destroyed by floods last month. — Photo thanhnien.vn

In mid-October, two weeks from the papaya harvest, torrential rain and heavy floods hit the central localities, blowing off roofs, damaging houses and washing away hundreds of hectares of fruits and vegetables in Bau Tron Village, one of Quang Nam’s largest vegetable-growing areas which supplies farm produce to the province and Da Nang City.

“This is a big property for farmers. We spent a lot of years growing plants and now see them lying on the soil, covered with mud,” Nam told Thanh niên (Young People) newspaper.

Instead of harvesting fruits and vegetables to prepare for new year consumption, more than 300 farming households in Dai Loc District are now cleaning their gardens which cover more than 40ha.

Hundreds of hectares of squashes, papayas, cucumbers, bitter melons and green beans planted for the lunar new year season were destroyed.

In his 20 years of growing vegetables, Ba Tam, a 51-year-old farmer in Dai An Commune, had never before seen 5,000sq.m of bitter melons washed away.

His family borrowed money to invest millions of dong into the farm and lost everything.

“Farmers like us do not have enough money to spare comfortably. Millions of dong is a lot to us. I hoped to earn from the farm to cover tuition fees for my children and prepare for Tet (Lunar New Year). But now we are empty-handed,” Tam said.

According to Dai Loc District’s Agriculture and Rural Development Department, nearly 800ha of fruits and vegetables were destroyed by prolonged and severe rain and floods. Local authorities have assisted farmers to recover from losses.

Many farmers tried to forget the heavy losses and started to sow the seeds from scratch. This time they selected short-term vegetables to grow and sell before Tet.

Le Tuan, a farmer in Dai Cuong Commune, said the biggest difficulty for farmers now was seed supplies and resources to invest in production.

“Besides small areas of farms having newly-sowed seeds, dozens of hectares of land in Bau Tron are still left empty. The prices of fruits and vegetables declined sharply after two waves of COVID-19. We thought we could recover when the pandemic was over but then we hard-hit by storms and floods. We lost everything,” Tuan said.

Mai Van Toan, a farmer of La Huong vegetable-growing area in Cam Le District, central Da Nang City, is growing short-term vegetables to meet market demand ahead of the new year.

Normally the end of the 10th lunar month is the time to sow vegetable seeds for Tet. But this year's prolonged rain and flood resulted in a serious shortage of clean vegetables. Traders in many places urgently asked farmers for a clean source of vegetables.

Farmers in La Huong have to take risks to grow short-term vegetables like water spinach, amaranth and Malabar spinach to sell to supermarkets, he said.

“We started to sow the seeds for Tet but feel worried mother nature will get angry again bringing more unusual rain and floods.”  VNS

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