In addition to livestock farming, cultivation, and agricultural production, Dao ethnic minority people in Ba Ra hamlet in Hung Son commune of Kim Boi district have also engaged in forestry-based livelihoods, especially bamboo shoot planting.


Everyday, Phung Dung Binh’s family purchases tonnes of fresh bamboo shoots from people in Ba Ra hamlet. 

According to Ly Sinh The, head of Ba Ra hamlet, the hamlet is home to over 90 households with more than 400 residents. Many households have continued to maintain areas of bamboo and rattan cultivation to increase their incomes. Apart from harvesting and thinning trees for sale, each year, households also earn extra income from collecting bamboo shoots. Local households can earn tens of millions of VND per crop. 

Trieu Xuan Kin, an elderly resident of Ba Ra hamlet, said like in many other places, people in the locality have been closely connected with bamboo shoots for generations. For them, drinking spring water and eating bamboo shoots symbolises a bond with the mountains and forests. Therefore, whenever the bamboo shoot season comes, people set aside their farming and fieldwork to go into the forest to harvest fresh bamboo shoots, both for personal use and to sell for additional income. 

Thanks to the cool climate all year-round and fertile soil, bamboo shoots in Ba Ra often grow large, white, and crispy. Some shoots can weigh up to 2-3 kg, making them highly favoured by traders, especially those buying bamboo shoots for processing pickled bamboo shoots or packaged bamboo shoots sold in supermarkets, or processing into dried bamboo shoots - a very popular product of Hoa Binh. 

Phung Dung Binh, a small trader who buys bamboo shoots from people in Ba Ra, said during the peak season, his family purchases tons of fresh bamboo shoots daily. 

According to Binh, each person involved in harvesting bamboo shoots can earn between 500,000 VND (20.05 USD) and 1 million VND per day. 

According to head of Ba Ra hamlet, Ly Sinh The, realising that planting bamboo trees can bring stable income, recently, some households in the hamlet have rented land in neighbouring communes to plant the tree. Thanks to that, every year they have an additional source of income of tens of millions of VND from bamboo shoots. 

Bamboo shoot is a farm produce that is favoured and widely consumed not only in the domestic market, but also for export. 

Packaged fresh bamboo shoots and pickled chili bamboo shoots produced by Kim Boi Bamboo Shoot JSC were among the top "20 Good Vietnamese Products for Consumer Benefit" in 2023. The company’s products have been sold in supermarkets, on e-commerce platforms, and exported to many countries around the world. Its typical product branded Kim Boi Bamboo Shoots, which meets the provincial 4-star OCOP standards, are being exported to Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK and some Eastern European countries. 

According to statistics from the provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, in 2023, Hoa Binh harvested about 5 million bamboo trees of all kinds and over 8,253 tonnes of bamboo shoots, which helped the locality earn over 136.3 billion VND in combined revenue. 

Bamboo products of all kinds have become raw materials for the processing industry as well as for producing household and handicraft products. 

Last year, the province raked in over 50 billion VND from selling bamboo and rattan products on the domestic market and exports.

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