VietNamNet Bridge – Vietnam’s science and technology has not developed enough to satisfy the demand from agriculture production, even though agriculture makes up a high contribution to the GDP, and farm produce exports brings a high proportion of income to the country.

Those, who visited Techmart 2012, a machinery and equipment international trade fair, held in September 2012, all felt surprised when seeing hundreds of machines and equipment made by farmers from all provinces and cities nationwide. These included carrot sowing machine, automatic garlic and onion slicing machine, husking machine.

The common thing of all the machines was that they were made by farmers to serve their agriculture production works, while the inventors did not think about the commercial development of the products or registration for intellectual property production.

The story showed that Vietnam’s science and technology remains not powerful enough to satisfy the demand of Vietnamese farmers and agriculture. Especially, Vietnam lacks the technologies for processing farm produce after the harvesting, which allow to keep the produce fresh for a long time, thus helping increase the value of Vietnam’s farm produce exports in the world market.

Nguyen Thi Xuan Thu, Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, has noted that a lot of enterprises would spend billions of dong to buy foreign technologies, but they would not spend money on developing technologies themselves.

This explains why the number of research works by domestic science and technology institutions which can be utilized in agriculture production remains very modest.

A report by the agriculture ministry released in December 2012 showed that 4,380 scientific research works and experimental production projects were carried out last year, which created 273 new plant varieties, 29 new livestock species and 20 technology processes on plant protection.

In 2001-2011, science and technology activities made up 35 percent of GDP in agriculture. Vietnam now has 11 main research institutes with 8,000 scientists and 33,000 officers in charge of encouraging agriculture production expansion.

However, experts said the number proves to make nothing if compared with the huge demand in different fields of the agriculture production. Rice, tea, coffee, pepper and rubber, the Vietnamese key export items, still have been sold at low prices in the world market due to their low competitiveness.

Meanwhile, the lack of post-harvesting processing technologies has forced Vietnam to export farm produce as raw materials for modest money, instead of exporting processed products with high added value for higher income.

The majority of farmers still lack information about new technologies, cannot approach new plant varieties and advanced cultivation process to meet the diversified demand in the market.

A question would be raised about how the scientific research works have been treated. The answer is that they have been put on the shelves.

The problem is that a lot of the research works cannot be utilized in reality. The leaders of the Ministry of Science and Technology have admitted that many works only covered the issues within the capability of scientists, not the issues for which farmers needed solutions in their production.

Dr. Nguyen Thi Tram from the Hanoi Agriculture University said that it would be better for scientists to invent technologies to the orders by farmers. Scientists would register to implement national research works with their money, and if they succeed, they would receive money from the state which would be tens of times higher than the expenses they spent to carry out the research works.

SGTT