Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has ordered related authorities to conduct comprehensive solutions to fight against the drought crisis.
Central Vietnam has been suffering from intense heat and severe drought and little relief is in sight. The forecast shows that it will only get worse during July.
 |
| Farmers in the Central area may suffer from a complete failure of harvest due to drought (Photo: VFEJ) |
Statistics released by the Ministry of Agriculture & Rural Development show that due to factors associated with no rainfall, hundreds of thousands of hectares of summer-autumn rice crops may fail. The damages are estimated at nearly VND2.5 trillion ($130 million).
Under the critical circumstances, the Prime Minister has sent an urgent document requesting the National Hydro-Meteorological Service to closely monitor weather developments providing continuous forecasts and warnings about drought and shortage of water. The forecasts on drought need to be informed timely to ministries and relevant agencies so that they can come up with appropriate prevention and response.
Furthermore, the Prime Minister also requested chairmen of the People’s Committees of affected provinces and cities to direct the departments of Agriculture & Rural Development and local authorities to conduct comprehensive solutions to fight against the crisis such as saving water and providing enough water for rice areas, civilians and cattle.
In order to respond timely to the situation, the Prime Minister asked local authorities to use their back-up budget for resolving the crisis. If their budgets are unable to meet the demands, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Agriculture & Rural Development will submit their reports to the Prime Minister for financial support.
Recently, the Ministry of Agriculture & Rural Development has sent to the Prime Minister a report on estimated damages and proposed financial support for the summer-autumn rice crops in the Central area. The total amount of money anticipated to be needed is over VND300 billion ($15.8 million). Among this, VND185 billion ($9,587,480) would be dedicated to the upper part of the Central area and VND115 billion ($6 million) would be delivered to the coast in the lower part of the Central area.
Additionally, Vietnam Electricity (EVN) was asked to provide enough power to help deal with the drought.
Nguyen Lan Chau, Deputy Director of the National Centre for hydro-meteorological forecasting said that the drought in the Central area would continue and even more severe. The total amount of rainfall in June was only 10-20% of what the area had seen last year.
