Over the last 20 years, Trat Cau, a craft village specializing in making bedding in Thuong Tin district in Hanoi, has always been ‘thirsty’ for production premises.

 Man Xa Village

In Trat Cau, rice fields have been left unused for many years. What visitors see is a crowded village with shops, big and small, in close proximity. The area is noisy because machines work all day long.

Twenty years ago, villagers only produced blankets in their free time, and field work was their major job.

Nguyen Quang Tha, chair of Trat Cau Craft Village Association, who runs the largest enterprise in the village, said some individuals in the village once worked for foreign invested enterprises. After a period of working and learning necessary skills, they quit the jobs and set up production workshops to make products themselves.

At present, Trat Cau has some 30 enterprises making bedding products with Japanese and South Korean machines.

“Trat Cau now is a big production center which runs day and night and there is no holiday,” Tha said, adding that every household in the village can put out 1,000 products every day.

Trat Cau’s people take pride in their products which are not only sold in Vietnam but also exported to China, Laos and Cambodia.

According to Duong Ngoc Minh, deputy chair of Tien Phong commune, Trat Cau has 1,000 production households with the average income of VND100 million a year. It is estimated that the annual total revenue of Trat Cau is VND200 billion.

Because of rapid development, Trat Cau now seriously lacks land for production workshops.

Le Van Thien, a producer, said he needs 400 square meters of land to run production, but could not rent land over the last 10 years.

The cancer village

Man Xa in Bac Ninh province, one of the waste recycling craft villages, is called a billionaires’ village because local residents are well off. However, it is also called the cancer village because of the high number of cancer patients.

In 2015, 29 deaths in the village were reported, and 10 of those from cancer. The figure was 13 out of 30 deaths in 2017 and 15 out of 31 in 2018.

In 2015, the National Center for Water Resources Planning and Investigation under the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment released a list of 37 cancer villages, and Man Xa was one of them. 

Linh Dan

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