August 9, 2018 — Vietnam has set an ambitious goal of becoming a leading country in aquaculture – specifically in the productive development of its coastal marine environment.
Currently ranked as the fourth-largest producer of seafood from aquaculture, behind China, Indonesia, and India, Vietnam produced 3.84 million metric tons (MT) of farmed seafood in 2017. That was more than 53 percent of Vietnam’s total seafood production of 7.23 MT, which itself represented an increase of 5.2 percent year-on-year over Vietnam’s total from 2016.
Vietnam’s government and industry stakeholders have recently taken a more serious interest in the development of Vietnam’s aquaculture sector, Tran Dinh Luan, the deputy director of Vietnam’s Fisheries General Department, told a workshop in Hanoi in early July.
The workshop, co-organized by the Vietnam Seaculture Association, Vietnam’s Fisheries Department, and the U.S. Soybean Export Council (USSEC), centered around Vietnam’s draft national strategy for marine aquaculture development through 2030. The strategy, with an addendum that proposes a vision through 2050, was prepared by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and will be submitted to Vietnam Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc for final approval.
The plan calls for the country to implement – on a trial basis – several policies designed to encourage industrial sea farming, particularly in offshore areas, by 2020. The plan aims to double the farmed output from the sea by 2020 to 750,000 MT total, comprising 200,000 MT of fish, 400,000 MT of mollusks and 150,000 MT of seaweed, according to the draft strategy.
Luan said while sea farming in Vietnam is still at its early stages of development, the strategy is designed to develop the whole production chain of the sector at larger and more advanced levels. In its latter stages of execution, the plan calls for production to rise to 1.75 million MT by 2030, and to three million MT by 2050.