VietNamNet Bridge – The rural picture of Vietnam exhibits more contrasting colors than ever as per a report on rural areas, agriculture and fisheries released by the General Statistics Office last Thursday.

Prolonged backwardness

According to a survey conducted by the General Statistics Office every five years, by the end of July last year, the total number of working-age people in rural areas was 32 million.



The proportion of rural laborers fell from 80% in 2001 to 60% in 2011, or an average reduction of two percentage points per year.

As much as 93% of rural workers have not undergone vocational training, meaning they are mainly manual laborers.

The majority of rural households use a very small piece of land for rice cultivation, with 85% of the 9.3 million households growing less than 0.5 hectare of rice, in which 50% use less than 0.2 hectare.

Up to 76% of the 4.1 million pig farming households are of small scale, raising only 1-5 head of cattle each.
There are over 2,500 agro-aqua-forestry businesses nationwide, whose debts amount to more than VND32 trillion, or each owes some VND13 billion.

The average income of agricultural cooperative employees is a mere VND201,000, while forestry cooperative workers are paid VND231,000.

In response to the Daily’s question whether Vietnam could achieve the target of industrialization and modernization by 2020 on such an agricultural platform, Do Thuc, director general of the General Statistics Office, deemed it “very difficult”.

“Vietnam only has eight years left to obtain the goal of becoming a newly-industrialized country. I think it is a great challenge and not easy to achieve,” he said.

He remarked that as rural laborers were now mainly manual ones, it would be difficult to mechanize agriculture as farmland is fragmented with each household only having 0.5 hectare for rice cultivation.

“For industrialization purpose, it is a must to improve knowledge of people and laborers, yet 93% of laborers are untrained. There are even 51 communes without primary schools,” he added.

Many improvements

However, the survey shows that rural areas have witnessed many changes in the past five years.

For example, 99.8% of the total 9,071 rural communes have received power supply, meaning only 17 communes were not provided with electricity last year, versus 100 in 2006 and 924 in 2001.

Some 99% of communes have roads leading to local government offices. Up to 99.5% of the communes have primary schools and 99.5% have healthcare stations.

Around 87% of rural households have telephones, compared to a mere 5% in 2001.

The most impressive result shown in the survey is that infrastructure such as power grids, schools, and rural healthcare stations has developed in both width and depth, said Pham Quang Vinh, director of the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Statistics Department.

In addition, the shift of laborers in rural areas to other areas is a “positive change,” said he.

Finally, he said the accumulated income of rural households had increased rapidly, higher than the GDP growth rate over the past five years, reflecting that the lives of farmers had been improved.

However, he admitted the survey could not calculate the real income of the rural areas due to the lack of data.

VietNamNet/SGT