Bac Giang encouraging production forest development

Bac Giang (VNA) - The northern province of Bac Giang is encouraging entities, businesses, and households to invest in production forest development.

The province is striving to have 6,000 ha of forests with sustainable forest management certification and 860,000 cu.m of wood for exploitation. Thirty percent will be used for export.

About 80,000 ha of forests for concentrated wood production will be in the districts of Son Dong, Luc Ngan, Luc Nam, and Yen The. By 2025, the area of large-scale wood forests is to reach 15,000 ha.

Bac Giang will also attract investment to build wood processing factories using modern technology and meeting standards for export to the US, the EU, and Japan, as well as develop forests in combination with ecological tourism.

Vice Chairman of the provincial People’s Committee Lai Thanh Son said the locality will enhance measures to protect and manage forests and continue protecting existing natural forests, while striving to plant about 7,200 ha of concentrated forests each year.

With the use of intensive farming techniques, wood output is expected to reach 22-25 cu.m per ha each year and forest coverage will be 38 percent by 2025.

The province will also raise the sense of responsibility among leaders, improve the efficiency of State management over local forest protection and development, seriously punish violators, and widely announce violations in the media. At the same time, it will drastically inspect and promptly punish legal violations in forestry as well as forestry land disputes and encroachment cases and illegal afforestation.

In the near future, it will focus on dealing with disputes in administrative border areas, forestry land encroachment cases at the grassroots level, overlapping certifications of forestry land use, and unclear delimitation in the field.

In the process of handling land dispute cases, the province will strive to prevent complaints in areas that could disturb local security and safety.

Tu Quoc Huy, deputy head of the provincial Forest Management Branch, said that since 2017 the province has arranged the signing of 5,807 commitments on forest protection and forest fire prevention and control with organisations, households, individuals, and residential communities living near forests. The province has planted over 24,600 ha of forests and 8 million trees, or 8,000 ha of concentrated forests.

Since 2018, competent authorities in Bac Giang have discovered and dealt with 278 violations of the Law on Forest Protection and Development, collected nearly 4.14 billion VND (180,000 USD) in fines for the State budget, and confiscated over 189 cu.m of wood of various kinds and more than 98 tonnes of other forestry products. Local legal enforcement agencies have launched criminal proceedings against six cases of natural forest destruction involving six defendants.

Last year, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc decided to support households from ethnic minority groups and families in the province in planting and taking care of forests in the 2019-2023 period.

He asked the Ministry of Finance to supply 4,830 tonnes of free rice from the national reserve to Bac Giang to support ethnic minority and poor households in Luc Ngan and Luc Nam districts.

The households, who have registered to voluntarily plant, care for, and protect the forests, will receive the assistance if they cannot afford food themselves in the 2019-2023 period.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development was asked to take responsibility for reporting contents and data.

The Bac Giang Provincial People’s Committee was requested to deliver the rice to beneficiaries in line with the policy.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Finance was assigned to work with the committee to define the actual amount of rice each year to suit actual demand, ensuring the time and roadmap for the project’s implementation and that the total amount does not exceed that determined by the Prime Minister./.