14ymedio, Havana, 30 May 2019 — Twenty years have passed since the start of the collaboration between Cuba and Vietnam to increase the island’s rice production. The authorities plan to produce 86% of internal demand in the new phase of the project, which begins this year and should end in 2023.
This new cycle, the fifth of the cooperation agreement initiated in 1999, foresees an increase in the area under cultivation to 200,000 hectares (495,000 acres), which must yield, if the plans are to be met, 6.0 tons per hectare.
The new objectives were addressed at a meeting held in Havana between agricultural officials and scientists from both countries.
Nguyen Hong Son, director of the Vietnam Academy of Agricultural Sciences, told the Vietnamese state news agency that rice cooperation is helping to guarantee food in Cuba.
For his part, the ambassador, Nguyen Trung Thanh, affirmed that the project expresses “the special solidarity between the two peoples” and highlights the ties between the two nations.
In the four previous phases, the objective was to improve Cuban production through technological improvement and the application of intensive production techniques.
At the end of the fourth phase, in 2015, the plan was in place in 12 of Cuba’s 15 provinces and covered an area totaling 54,000 hectares. According to data from Vietnam, this represents an increase of 163% over the forecasts, since the new cultivation models produced 4.36 tons per hectare, compared to the previous yield of just 2.5 tons.
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