A dairy farm in central Vietnam has been awarded a Global Good Agricultural Practice (G.A.P) certificate, the first in Southeast Asia and the third in Asia to receive the international honor.
Richard De Boer, director of the Vietnam branch of the Netherlands-based Control Union Certifications B.V., granted the certificate to the farm run by Vietnam Dairy Products Joint Stock Co, better known as Vinamilk, in the central province of Nghe An on Friday.
It took the farm eight months to implement all necessary procedures for the certificate.
Previously, five Vinamilk dairy farms achieved ISO 9001: 2008 certification for quality management under the Belgium-based Bureau Veritas Organization.
Global G.A.P. is a farm management tool created to meet the needs of the domestic and international markets for the quality and safety of products, thus raising the value of the qualified farm produce.
It also helps boost the efficient use of resources and sustainable agricultural production, contributing to rural development and environmental protection.
In another development, the Dutch-owned FrieslandCampina Vietnam Co started work on the construction of a project on expanding large-scale dairy farms in the northern province of Ha Nam on Wednesday.
The 54.5 ha project, the first to be financed by the Dutch dairy producer in the Vietnamese market, aims to create 10 dairy farms. After five years, each farm, two of which are scheduled for completion by December of this year, will be home to 50-80 milk cows.
The project is also tailored to ensure a stable supply of raw milk for FrieslandCampina’s facilities in Vietnam, the dairy producer said.
FrieslandCampina has also planned to establish a system aiming to purchase raw milk at competitive prices from local farmers and another to control product quality.
Ha Nam now has a herd of some 500 milk cows that generate dairy products worth a total of around VND15 billion (US$707,630) a year. It has set a target to expand the herd to 2,000 by 2015 and 7,000-8,000 by 2020.
The Vietnam National Animal Husbandry Association has revised its plan to import some 150,000 cows from Australia in 2014, up 30,000 from the previous plan set earlier this year, due to strong demand in the first half. Australia exported 527,000 cows by the end of May, of which 72,000 were sent to Vietnam, according to Australian statistics. Increasing cow imports from Australia is making up for a plunging supply from Laos and Cambodia, the association said. As many as 96,000 cows were imported from the two neighboring countries to Vietnam in 2013, down about 47 percent year on year. The volume of Australian cows shipped to Vietnam, on the other hand, increased over 22 times from 2012 to nearly 67,000 heads last year. |
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