Agriculture in Muong Pa is seeing positive transformation with new thinking and approach, said Ha Thanh Hoan, Secretary of the Bao La Party Committee. It was owing to the support of the GNI in Vietnam, he added.
GNI staff in Mai Chau provides training on clean agriculture for
farmers in Bao village, Bao La commune.
The international humanitarian development non-governmental organisation has been supporting the development of livelihood in Muong Pa through a project on rural development assistance in Mai Chau, phase 2 from 2015 – 2019.
Before the project was carried out, people in Bao village, Bao La commune only farmed wet rice, but with the help of GNI, farmers here have started planting higher-value side crops in their paddy terraces.
Under the project, a cooperative for pig farming in Muong Pa was also established in August 2018, starting with ten farmer households in Bao La and Xam Khoe.
In the two communes, eight livelihood groups have been founded in which farmers are provided with advanced agricultural techniques and knowledge on food safety practices. They were also trained in how to develop business plans; and together they visited agricultural demonstrations.
The group members have been also offered with soft loans worth nearly 2.1 billion VND to expand their production.
To scale up safe agriculture production models, the GNI has built two inner-field ditches with a total length of 700 metres to supply water for 13 hectares of fields at a cost of over 166 million VND.
Of 119 poor and near-poor households who are members of the project’s livelihood groups, over 84 percent said they are satisfied with the livelihood support while only 1.7 percent were not satisfied because they believed the loan repayment deadlines should stay in line with the production cycles and the members should receive bigger loans.
Besides these 119 households, 11 others have taken part in a livelihood group for safe vegetable and fruit farming which have reported an increase in their income per capita per year from 9.5 million VND in 2016 to 25 million VND last year./.
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