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Asian Journal of Agriculture and Development (AJAD) - Call for papers!

Swine Commodity Systems Study in Cantho Province, Vietnam

(Vietnam), Master of Management in Agribusiness Management (University of the Philippines Los Baños)

Field Study Abstract:

 

The study of swine commodity system was conducted to present and analyze the status of the swine commodity system in Cantho Province, Vietnam, with the end view of identifying investment and development entry points, which can be used as guidelines to prospective policymakers, economic planners, and local authorities in coming up with alternative ways to develop and improve the existing swine commodity system. A total of 187 respondents composed of breeders, assemblers, slaughterhouses, and personnel from a processing company were selected using convenient sampling method.

Results showed that most of the breeders were backyard raisers and produced small and medium numbers of swine level. They were rarely trained on breeding techniques. The activities of breeders, assemblers and slaughterhouses were strongly affected by internal and external environment such as insufficiency of capital, seasonality factor, competition, instability of input and output prices, and risks caused by epidemic diseases. Breeders also had many difficulties in expanding their operations. They sell their swine based on friendship, cash-basis transaction, and by sending message to the buyers.

Low quality of the products, small processing capacity, and obsolete machines and equipment were the main problems of the processing sector. Therefore, there is a need to invest more in modern technologies for processing, adequate storage facilities, and means of transportation.

 

The study also looked into the retailers and wholesalers, who incurred much risk secondarily from breeders. Most risks were the availability of substitute products and seasonality factor.

Agriculture Bank plays an important role in financing and supporting the swine industry. However, the farmers may still have many difficulties to loan from the bank because of complex and strict loan policies and requirements. As a result, many farmers and middlemen opted to look for credit from informal sources with high interest rate.

In the public sector, breeders are strongly supporting and getting benefits from Cantho Agriculture Department and Encourage Agriculture Center to develop swine industry. In general, the most problematic subsystem was the distribution and marketing sector. Problems included market access and market information constraint. It was hard for swine producers to collect market information which may result in low market power of swine producers.

This research found some solutions to increase production effectively to develop the swine industry in Cantho province. These include: (1) developing the domestic markets; (2) promoting veterinary networks to hybridize high productivity piglets, and modernize the pork-processing technology; and (3) calling for foreign investments in breeding and food processing.