A seminar opened in Da Lat city, Lam Dong province on May 14, gathering 150 bamboo local and foreign experts to discuss the development of the bamboo industry in Vietnam.

According to economists, managers, enterprises and bamboo growers, bamboo has become increasingly important for the current life. It is used more and more widely, as a substitute for wood – a degrading natural resource, in construction, interior decoration and as family utensils.

Users, moreover, tend to prefer environmentally friendly products, they added.

According to Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Ho Xuan Hung, Vietnam currently has over five million hectares of bamboo trees or around 4.3 billion trees. The country’s annual output can top 400 million trees.

However, Hung said, the capacities of managing, developing and exploiting economic and environmental benefits from the tree remain low.

The event is expected to be a forum for both policy-makers, enterprises and farmers to discuss measures to effectively exploit the economic benefits from bamboos.

Participants brought to the meeting 13 presentations, focusing on four main areas, from the overview of Vietnam’s bamboo industry, development trends of world markets for Vietnamese bamboos to applications of bamboos and bamboo products and development strategies for the tree./.