HANOI: Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc urged the shrimp industry to apply better technologies to increase its productivity to aim at reaching an export value of USD10 billion by 2025.
“I urge the sector to earn USD10 billion by 2025 and become a major industry of Vietnamese agriculture,” Phuc said during a conference on shrimp production held in the southern province of Ca Mau this week.
Vietnam has become the world’s third largest shrimp exporter and the world’s leading exporter of giant tiger prawn with foreign sales representing 50 per cent of its total exports of seafood.
Giant tiger prawn and white-legged shrimp are being farmed in 30 provinces and cities and are key export products. Most of the production comes from the southern central provinces of Ninh Thuan, Binh Thuan, Khanh Hoa, and the southwestern provinces such as Ca Mau and Bac Lieu.
According to Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Nguyen Xuan Cuong, shrimp, due to its high value, has been chosen as an important product for restructuring the seafood industry in particular, and agriculture in general.
Phuc said the shrimp industry should work to account for 10 per cent of the country’s GDP and asked the State Bank of Vietnam to instruct commercial banks to provide sufficient capital for the industry, especially for high-tech breeding.
“Inadequate high tech for intensive farming has resulted in only modest productivity of 250 to 300 kilo gram of shrimp per hectare; if productivity is doubled, we can immediately reach our goal,” he stressed.
The government said key to the development of the sector was advanced biotechnology as well as automation plus improvements in packaging and branding.
The sector was expected to get a boost from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), whose members accounted for almost half of seafood export destinations, but US President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the trade deal has left the project’s fate uncertain, DW informed.
The US is Vietnam’s largest shrimp importer, accounting for 23 percent of exports worth USD520.2 million in the first nine months of 2016.
