By Dr. Dang Kim Son, Director of the Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Development (IPSARD).
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| Public land along Tran Quoc Toan Street is used as parking lot |
A conference held by NA's Economic Committee discussed the process of developing industrial and urban areas in rural areas. Participants agreed that land was being let go to waste due to inefficient use and slow project implementation.
Forested land covers nearly 14 million hectares but contributes just 1% of the country’s GDP and 3-4% of both economic and environment value.
According to IPSARD research, the total land that state forest enterprises and farms are holding is worth at least USD47 billion. However, their ratio of revenue divided by capital is only 0.61, the ratio of profit divided by capital is 0.07 lower than the rate of private enterprises which is 1.5 and 0.14.
In reality, the land used by state forestry enterprises and farms might be even less.
During the restructuring process, enterprises rarely do any field surveying. The Steering Committee for Innovation and Enterprise Development reported that large areas of land haven't been recovered after they were rented out or borrowed.
The land still remains unused. By 2005, 6.5 million hectares of barren lands sat idle in Vietnam's Northwest and Northeast despite the low forest resource in these two regions. Not only this is wasteful but also danger for the environment.
In 2007, Vietnam had about 9.4 million hectares cultivated land, with agricultural land per capita at just 0.16 hectares, less than one third of Thailand and Cambodia. Research of Danish International Development Agency in 2010 showed that the farmers have many scattered lands. These scattered lands prevent them from large scale farming and the farmers gain less profit even though they have many lands.
However the ability to accumulate farm land is currently low. In addition, without credit support, they can not buy or rent land. As a result, the land has been mostly bought by speculative investors for ineffective businesses.