President attends ploughing festival in Ha Nam

Ha Nam (VNA) – President Tran Dai Quang attended the annual Tich Dien (ploughing) festival in Doi Son commune, the Red River Delta province of Ha Nam on February 3, which praises for a bumper rice harvest in 2017 – the Year of the Rooster.

On the occasion, the State leader launched an agricultural mechanisation programme by directly driving a tractor on the field to encourage localities nationwide to promote industrialisation and modernisation of agriculture and rural areas. 

In his speech, President Quang highlighted the significance of the festival, saying that the annual event has become a tradition in the locality’s cultural life, which was recognised as an intangible cultural heritage of the nation.

The Tich Dien festival dignifies the importance of agriculture and the role of farmers, and contributes to preserving and upholding cultural values of the locality, he stressed. 

It is also an activity to introduce Ha Nam’s images and tourism potential to domestic and foreign visitors and overseas Vietnamese, thus promoting the province’s socio-economic development, he added. 

He expressed his pleasure with the fact that Ha Nam and other localities nationwide have recorded more and more concentrated and machine-based goods production models with the application of high technologies, and cooperation with foreign investors to produce and process high-quality farm produce. 

The President took the occasion to call on sectors and localities throughout the country to successful implement the Party and State’s guidelines and policies related to agriculture, farmers, rural development and new-style rural area building. 

Ha Nam and other localities should boost hi-tech agriculture development and export of high-quality agricultural products, towards improving the living standards of farmers and contributing to the nation’s development, he said. 

The festival began in 987 during the Le dynasty when King Le Dai Hanh decided to plough in Doi Son commune, Duy Tien district to wish for bumper crops. The practice then became an annual tradition held through many dynasties before falling into oblivion under the reign of King Khai Dinh of the Nguyen dynasty. It was restored in 2009. 

Vietnam has about 8,000 festivals each year. Of which, nearly 90 percent are traditional festivals, 6 percent are religious ones and 4 percent are historical ones.-VNA