Business
November 21, 2005
Vietnam to intensify hybrid rice production
Vietnam has turned out few good hybrid rice strains and has to relies on imported ones, according to sources from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development Monday.
Vietnam has so far developed dozens of hybrid rice strains, most of which are still in experimental stage. Many local hybrid rice strains have unstable quality which are unable to resist pests and diseases.
Vietnam has to import 80 percent of hybrid rice strains used for its winter-spring crops. In recent years, it has imported 11, 000-14,000 tons of different types of hybrid rice seeds, mainly from China, annually.
More than 82 billion Vietnamese dong (nearly 5.2 million US dollars) from the central state budget and a similar amount from provincial budgets have been spent on developing hybrid rice since 1992, but the investment has been slowly disbursed to too many research institutes and localities, resulting in few good rice strains.
The ministry has so far recognized Viet Lai 20 as the first, also the sole, national hybrid rice variety. It has a growth period of only 85-115 days, is able to resist common pests and diseases, and yields 6.5-8 tons per hectare.
Vietnamese farmers started using hybrid rice in 1992. Now, it has some 600,000 hectares of rice crops using hybrid varieties with average productivity of nearly 6.4 tons per hectare.
Vietnam is intensifying the production of hybrid rice, aiming to meet some 70 percent of its demand for the product in 2010, the sources said.
The country produced 35.7 million tons of paddy rice in 2004, up 3.5 percent over 2003. Meanwhile, it exported more than four million tons of rice, mainly to the Asia-Pacific region, Africa and the Middle East.
Source: Xinhua
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