Bac Lieu farmers stuck with salt

With the next production season all set to start, farmers in Bac Lieu Province have 134,000 tonnes of black salt still in stock, according to the province’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.

During the last season at the beginning of this year, Bac Lieu, which, at 3,500ha, has the largest salt-production area in the Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta, produced a record output of more than 266,000 tonnes, or two times the quantity produced a year earlier.

Of this, nearly 90 per cent was black salt.

In late June, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development had ordered the Northern Food Corporation to buy salt from farmers in Bac Lieu who had around 200,000 tonnes in stock.

The corporation assigned the Bac Lieu Salt Trading Joint-Stock Company to buy 30,000 tonnes.

However, Bac Lieu and other companies could only buy a total of 7,000 tonnes of white salt due to finance, warehousing, and transportation problems.

To help farmers build warehouses to store their stocks, the provincial People’s Committee has provided more than 400 of them interest-free loans worth a total of VND1.3 billion (US$68,000). — VNS

Tags: Bac Lieu, Vietnam salt