VietNamNet Bridge - If the world held a contest on the piggyback ability if chickens, it is very likely that Vietnam’s chickens would be the champion in the most convincing way.

This prediction is well grounded because according to a recent survey, a chicken in Vietnam “carries” on its back up to 14 kinds of fees. Even chicken eggs have at least three kinds of veterinary fees.

When income goes down but the cost goes up, seeking livelihood from agriculture in Vietnam is not easy at all. The dream of a happy life for Vietnamese farmers seems to be a distant one.

Piles of fees

It is frightening to realize the dozen kinds of expenditures and fees that rice growers have to pay for 1kg of paddy.

The most basic fees are expenditures for seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, wages for working the soil, implants, harvesting, operating flood control, canal dredging, payments for the village head’s management tasks, repair of pumping stations and irrigation works, inventory, management, science and technology, rat-killing funds, interest rates, and others.

But in rural areas, people have to pay many other kinds of fees, for example: public fund, disaster prevention fund, funds for children and for the elderly, security fund, fund for construction of rural roads, fund for building cultural houses and cemeteries, the fund for the poor, for education promotion, for poverty alleviation, for building houses for the poor, and more.

Payments for these fees all come from rice.

In the Mekong Delta, to take an egg from their home to the market, farmers have to pay three kinds of quarantine fees. The first time is when egg traders carry the egg from the farm to their warehouse. The second time is when they classify the eggs to transport to HCM City and the third is when the egg arrives in the city for sale.

A chicken has 14 kinds of fees from birth until it is slaughtered. Nguyen Van Truc, CEO of the Saigon Agriculture Corporation, said there were quarantine fees for newly hatched chicks, a quarantine fee for exporting chickens from one farm in a province to another, and fees for slaughtering, disinfection and sterilization. He said that breeders even had to pay a fee for collecting water samples for testing diseases in poultry.

There are many kinds of odd fees, for example, the one-day valid licence for egg exports in Lao Cai Province or the duck fee in Ha Tinh, where farmers have to pay VND1,000/duck raised for meat and VND2,000/duck bred for eggs.

In 2012, a local newspaper published a report on fees on agricultural products. After more than two years, it seems the number of fees on agricultural produce has remained unchanged.

In October 2013, Thanh Nien Newspaper quoted a report by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development as saying that Vietnamese farmers had to pay 131 kinds of fees and charges, including 93 types of fees and charges prescribed by the state and 38 other social contributions.

In this context, improving the competitiveness of Vietnamese agricultural products and the income for farmers in Vietnam can be very difficult.

When will farmers be happy?

Farmers are waiting for changes and improvements, including the review and elimination of unreasonable fees imposed on their rice, potatoes, chicken and eggs. Cao Duc Phat, Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, raised his voice on the issue early this month.

At the same time, farmers are longing for new solutions to cut costs, to reduce the intermediaries in the consumption of agricultural products, and to increase income.

They also hope to live by farming and don’t want to give up their land, or leave their village to seek employment opportunities in town.

While the dream of Vietnamese farmers seems to be far away, we should take a look around.

"As happy as Japanese farmers" is the title of an article by an agricultural expert in 2012.

According to the author, the model of the agricultural auction market in Japan helped farmers sell their products at the highest price because the model rejected all the unnecessary intermediaries.

Japan currently has 130 agricultural auction firms in 37 provinces.

In Australia, there are only 400,000 farmers, 4% of the workforce, but the country’s self-sufficiency in food is one of the highest in the world.

Australian farmers are encouraged to establish professional associations, which are responsible for calculating the supply and demand of the market and helping farmers sell their products at the highest prices.

US farmers are the richest in the world. The country has over 50,000 farms with sales of over $1 million/year and average income per household is $200,000/year, as much or more than lawyers or doctors.

To help farmers realize their dream, many tasks must be done, and one of them is to remove the burden off their backs.

Nguyen Anh Thi