The General Statistics Office (GSO) will conduct a census from July 1 to July 30 to collect information on rural areas, agriculture, and seafood.

Abridged results will be published in December and the full results and accompanying assessment will be published in August 2017.

The Vietnamese Government is also preparing for a national economic census in 2017. Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hue recently asked the Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) to prepare a draft decision on the census for submission to the Prime Minister.

The draft is to follow the amended Law on Statistics in 2015 and stipulate the establishment of a steering committee but not its membership.

Dr. Nguyen Bich Lam, Director General of the GSO, said the July census comes at the direction of the government.

This will be the fifth the GSO has conducted, following on from 1996, 2001, 2006 and 2011.

More indicators have been added this year to assess agriculture restructuring, business scale, technology application, links in manufacturing, and product consumption. The information collection method has also been reformed.

For example, instead of overly focusing on rural households to collect information, information will be collected from indirect sources such as local authorities.

Mr. Lam said that the results of this census will have a key role to play because Vietnam is enhancing its economic restructuring and the agriculture sector to improve living standards, with most of the population living in the countryside.

Results will be used to identify development trends in rural areas to build an agriculture plan and strategy to improve living standards of farmers in general and in each region in particular.

Moreover, the results will be used to assess the impact of certain national programs in industrialization and agricultural modernization.

The scale of the census is huge, Mr. Lam said, because it will be implemented on a national scale to investigate 17 million units in agriculture, forestry and fisheries and will require 180,000 staff. To ensure the census is successful, preparations have been conducted at all levels.

In the first half of this year the contribution of agriculture, forestry and fishery to GDP growth fell due to climate change, with a colder winter in the north, serious drought in the south, and saltwater intrusion in the Mekong Delta. This is the first time agriculture’s contribution to the economy has fallen.

Agriculture exports in the first half were about $7.32 billion, an increase of 5.1 per cent year-on-year, according to the Ministry of Agricultural and Rural Development (MARD).

Seafood exports were about $3.07 billion, up 3.8 per cent, while forestry exports were about $3.33 billion, down 0.1 per cent.

The US, Japan, China, and South Korea were the four largest markets for Vietnam in the first five months.

Imports to the US grew 10.9 per cent, China 49.06 per cent, Thailand 9.92 per cent, and the UK 8.83 per cent.