VietNamNet Bridge - Vietnamese farmers, who suffered from big losses for a long time due to high input costs and low selling prices, cannot hold out anymore. Cheap chicken imports from the US have dealt a final blow, forcing them to give up farming. 

The districts of Chuong My, Ba Vi and Dong Anh in Hanoi and Phu Binh in Thai Nguyen province were once well known as the biggest white-feather fowl farming areas in the north.

However, the farms have become empty as the owners have given up farming after a long time of struggling to survive. 

Tran Ba Pho, a farmer in Thanh Binh commune of Chuong My district, said he spent 10 years long to farm white-feather fowls and he has no money after ‘gambling’ with farming.

Pho’s ‘golden age’ was 2002-2004, when he made a fat profit of VND100 million for every 5,000-6,000 chickens sold. But later, he lost all of the money he earned in 2005, when the bird flu epidemic broke out.

In the following years, Pho’s farming recovered thanks to the stable chicken price. However, he could not earn big profits as he had done before because of the farms which do farming for foreign invested enterprises.

However, Pho’s business has once again gone downhill as the chicken price has dropped dramatically since 2012. The chicken price is now hovering around VND30,000 per kilo, nearly the same as the production cost.

There are only a few households in Thanh Binh commune which still keep chickens. They are raising chickens either for CP or Jafa companies. The households still can earn money with farming, but profits are very modest. 

A local farmer said he could make a profit of tens of millions of dong for every 5,000-6,000 chicken raised. Meanwhile, the initial cost for setting up a farm is very high, about VND1 billion.

Tran Ba Thang, a farmer from Thanh Ne Hamlet in Thanh Binh Commune, said he has decided to farm color-feather chickens instead, because he ‘completely failed to raise white-feather chickens’.

He said he knows another 20 households in the same hamlet have also given up farming white-feather chickens.

Thang noted that the only advantage of white-feather chicken farming is that he can sell chickens after 40-45 days of raising. Meanwhile, there are a lot of disadvantages, including the high initial cost, high electricity consumption and unstable feed price.

Though the input costs are very high, farmers cannot raise the selling prices because of the presence of US chicken imports in the Vietnamese market, which is surprisingly cheap. A kilo of US chicken sells for VND20,000 per kilo, even lower than the production cost of VND30,000 per kilo.

Tran Thuy