According to a survey by the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development in the southern province of Dong Nai, foreign direct investment (FDI) companies tend to suffer fewer losses than domestic farms and households when prices of pork and chicken fall.
Better breeding chicken and livestock methodologies and advanced technology has helped FDI companies lower their cost price.
When pork price falls to as low as VND38,000 a kilogram, FDI businesses still profit while breeding farms lose VND2,200 a kilogram and households around VND5,000 a kilogram.
A kilogram of white industrial chicken fetches only VND14,000, causing a loss of VND8,000 to FDI companies, but for breeding farms it is upto VND17,000.
Officials from the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development in Binh Dinh Province said that blue ear disease and bird flu occur annually, resulting in both price fall and reduction in scale of breeding each successive year.
The number of small scale farms is still high, providing 65-70 percent of total output. Since 2003, diseases have mainly occurred in small scale farms run by households while large scale farms have been able to protect their chicken and livestock with advanced methods.
Nguyen Xuan Duong, deputy head of the Livestock Department under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, said that pig and chicken breeding has dropped by 2-2.5 percent over the same period last year and by 3-4 percent for buffaloes and cows.
Nguyen Van Bac, deputy head of the National Agriculture Extension Center in HCMC, said that domestic breeders are slow in accessing advanced technologies, thus their cost price is always high.
Dr. Bac has proposed to group households in cooperatives that authorized organs will organize training courses to provide them with breeding knowledge and measures to prevent diseases. They will also help breeders apply advanced technologies to reduce cost price.
Vietnam’s pork output accounts for 42.2 percent to rank first and duck output 22.4 percent to rank second in Southeast Asia.
