Over the last 5 years, the total investment into rural development has mounted to 113 thousand billion dongs sharing 8.7% of the country’s investment. This figure indicates the fact that the agricultural and rural sector becomes less attractive to the investors due to its high risks and unfavorable investment environment. At present, there have been across the country around 16.000 enterprises, 7.310 cooperatives and 1000 state own agro-forestry businesses with 90% of which are small and medium size enterprises (SMEs).
Under this reality, policy makers and scientists agreed that it was important to create a support mechanism for rural SMEs.
“The difficulties that SMEs are facing now are the funds for developing projects and accessing to different sources of credit. To solve this problem, I recommend that the government pay more attention to credit policy which would provide supports to SMEs. For the association itself, we are committing to mobilize fund from different sources including those from foreigners and at the same time plan to establish credit funds to support SMEs”.
(Mr. Le Khac Triet – Chairman of SMEs and Rural Occupation Association)
The latest study of IPSARD indicates that expanding production scale by rural SMEs is facing with difficulty as it lacks integrated projection, suitable supporting policies. For these reasons, SMEs are getting less supports in funding, science and technology, personnel training and market information.
“Working in a policy research institution, we are very much concerned about the investment environment for and the operation undertaken by enterprises and businesses. We would like to study and review the existing policy network to identify constraints before which could be removed and are willing to cooperate with Vietnam’s Commerce and Industry Chamber and in-line ministries to assist and support the growth of SMEs”
(Mr. Dang Kim Son, director of IPSARD)
““This is the first year we develop a Yearbook on Agriculture and its perspective in 2008. We believe that this publication will contribute significantly to the growth of SMEs by helping them to access market information under the international economic integration and increased competitiveness process”.
(Mr. Pham Quang Dieu, director of AGROINFOR of IPSARD)
“At macro-level, we should continue upgrading the existing legal and policy framework in order to solve the current land, credit and labor constraints”
(Ms. Pham Chi Lan, senior economic expert)
“Rural SMEs are less developed as they are scattered and small and investment into rural region can generate only low benefits. Therefore, we need to provide a strong push so that SMEs can be further developed with an aim to fulfill the two objectives: withdrawing surplus labor from the agricultural sector and putting into better use the local resources. We recommend that to support SMEs, it is important to solve problems on land and credit”
(Mr. Do Anh Tuan, deputy director of CAP of IPSARD)