pFast-industrialising Vietnam plans to protect at least 3.9 million hectares (9.6 million acres) of rice fields to ensure long-term national food security, state media reported on Friday.
The move comes amid the global food price surge that has seen grain prices skyrocket and aims to preserve a core growing area of the national staple food from mushrooming industrial parks, urban areas and golf courses.
Deputy Prime Minister Hoang Trung Hai has instructed the Agriculture Ministry to prepare a Rice Cultivation Land Management decree and submit it for approval in the third quarter, the Tuoi Tre newspaper reported.
Amid Vietnam's economic boom, rice land -- mainly in the Mekong delta around Ho Chi Minh City and the Red River delta around Hanoi -- has shrunk from about 4.5 million to 4.1 million hectares between 2000 and 2006, says the ministry.
Aside from the building of new factories, rice paddy is also being gobbled up by 123 golf courses that are either in operation or being planned, and which require large amounts of water and pesticides, state media has reported.
Development has seen thousands of rice farmers lose their ancestral lands, driving a steady series of demonstrations outside government offices by farmers who typically complain they received insufficient compensation.
In a protest last month, hundreds of angry farmers in central Nghe An province set up roadblocks to stop the building of an industrial park, claiming they were short-changed by developers, the Thanh Nien daily reported.
Rice prices have shot up this year, helping to drive inflation in Vietnam to 25 percent year-on-year in May, which has triggered about 300 labour strikes in the first quarter and sparked bouts of panic-buying and rice hoarding.
The communist government has sought to assure Vietnam's 86 million people that the country, the world's number two rice exporter, has sufficient stocks and has also threatened to punish speculators who are driving up prices.
Following what farm groups describe as a bumper crop, Vietnam plans to lift a temporary halt on new rice export contracts by July as planned, and aims to reach an export target of 3.5 million to 4.0 million tonnes this year.
The Agriculture Ministry also plans to set up a national rice reserve of 100,000 tonnes to help stabilise distribution and meet domestic demand when market prices fluctuate, the state-run Vietnam News Agency reported.
The latest plans -- which follow a proposal to gradually scale down annual rice exports to 3.8 million tonnes by 2020 -- aim to ensure that Vietnam keeps sufficient rice lands to feed an expanding population in the future.
"There are too many industrial parks, projects, golf courses, and so on," economist Le Dang Doanh, a veteran government advisor, recently told AFP. "The problem is now how to ensure food security as demographic pressures, the increase of the population, are still increasing."
World grain prices have risen sharply this year, a trend blamed on higher energy and fertiliser costs, greater global demand, droughts, the loss of farmland to biofuel plantations, industry and cities, and price speculation.
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