Artemia breeding ponds in Bac Lieu province’s Hoa Binh district. (Photo: VNA) It will focuson agriculture, seafood, salt production, industry including small businesses,construction, transport, trading, and services.
It plans toestablish 140 new cooperatives, 105 in agriculture, by 2025.
It willencourage cooperative groups that operate efficiently to develop into cooperatives.Under the 2012 Cooperative Law, a cooperative group has at least three membersand a cooperative, at least seven.
To achieve thetargets, the province will take measures like boosting advocacy about the lawand implementing it, improving the operations of collective economy units andmobilising investments from various sources to enhance their efficiency.
It will havepreferential policies to get outstanding university graduates and youngscientists to manage cooperatives, encourage research into advanced techniquesfor developing the collective economy and prioritise soft loans for cooperativesto acquire them.
It will focuson developing brand names for cooperatives to increase their competitiveness,and organise trade promotion activities at home and abroad to popularise them.
It will createconditions for cooperatives and cooperative groups to exchange experiences andlink up with companies to develop value chains.
It willprioritise creation of infrastructure for transport, power and water andirrigation to enable development of the collective economy.
The provincehas 170 cooperatives, but a majority have little capacity in terms of finance,competitiveness and management, and face difficulties in adopting advancedtechniques and seeking outlets for their products, according to its CooperativeAlliance.
It saidco-operation between members of a cooperative, between cooperatives and betweencooperatives and companies have not been implemented efficiently.
With thenumber of cooperative managers who have a college or university degree onlymeeting 79 per cent of target, most lack the skills needed for managing andorganising the operation of cooperatives, it added.
Nguyen Van Vu,its chairman, said the alliance would work with local authorities to improvethe quality of management and instruct cooperatives in linking up withcompanies.
Under thenational target programme for building new-style rural areas, the province’s cooperatives,especially agricultural cooperatives, have got more support in recent years.
“Cooperativescan easily access loans from the province’s Cooperative Development Fund,” Vusaid.
The fundprovided loans worth a total of 6.3 billion VND (273,000 USD) to nine cooperativeslast year and would provide 19 billion VND (821,000 USD) to 26 others thisyear, he said.
The alliancehas identified some efficient cooperatives for further development, and theywill get priority in promoting their products, building brands and getting softloans.
The Vinh ChauArtemia Cooperative in Bac Lieu city’s Vinh Trach Dong commune is one of thoseselected.
With supportfrom the alliance and local authorities, it breeds artemia, also known as brineshrimp, for harvesting its eggs.
When artemiaeggs are harvested and processed, they can be stored for a very long time. Whenthe eggs are provided sufficient conditions, they will hatch into nauplii,which are used as food for fish and shrimp larvae and have high nutritionalvalue.
The cooperativeexports its artemia eggs to many markets, including the US and the EU, and hasannual revenues of 20 billion VND (865,000 USD)./.
VNA
