The country’s rice granary has been hit by prolonged heavy rains in recent days brought by a tropical depression.

In Sóc Trăng Province, farmers in low-lying places like Mỹ Tú and Thạnh Trị districts and Ngã Năm Town are beginning the harvest of 19,000ha of summer-autumn rice but many fields are inundated, reducing yields and increasing costs.

In Mỹ Tú District, Mỹ Tú Commune has 100ha of ripe rice but farmers cannot harvest them because machines cannot operate in flooded fields.

Lý Văn Tạo in Mỹ Tú Commune said his one hectare of rice ripened last week but he could not harvest it.

The commune does not have an electric pumping station to bail the water out of fields and most farmers have to do it themselves, and this raises production costs by VNĐ1-2 million (US$40-80) per hectare, he said.

In low-lying areas, rice fields are often 25-35cm under water during the rainy season, according to the provincial Irrigation Sub-department.

Phạm Tân Đạo, its head, said his agency is mobilising farmers to pump water out of fields and operating sluices to drain them.

In Kiên Giang, the country’s largest rice producing province, farmers sowed the summer-autumn rice crop on 276,000ha staggering the cropping.

They began harvesting the crop at the end of last month, have completed 150,000ha so far, and expect to finish it in August.

Lê Hữu Toàn, director of the Kiên Giang Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, said to protect the remaining crop, local administrations and farmers would mobilise all resources and take advantage of sunny weather to harvest rice quickly when it is about 85 per cent ripe.

In Cà Mau Province, heavy rains have damaged nearly 600ha of rice in Trần Văn Thời District sowed late and are 40 days old.

The last dry season caused farmers sow the summer-autumn rice 15-30 days later than normal, and so their young rice crop has been inundated and damaged in the prolonged rain, according to the Trần Văn Thời Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Nguyễn Việt Khái, its head, said rice fields have often been inundated during the rainy season in recent years, and resolving the problem needs a closed irrigation system with 16 pumping stations with a total capacity of 600,000cu.m of water per hour.

The district has petitioned the provincial People’s Committee and Department of Agriculture and Rural Development to build the irrigation system and pumping stations, he added.

In this summer-autumn crop, Cà Mau has planted 35,000ha of rice, 29,000ha in Trần Văn Thời.

In other localities, farmers have begun harvesting rice early to avoid risks from the weather by the time the crop ripens.

In Cần Thơ, farmers have harvested summer-autumn rice earlier than scheduled and completed harvesting all 71,280ha of summer- autumn rice.

Their average yield has been 5.9 tonnes per hectare, the same as a year ago. VNS