Vietnamese fertilisers, pesticides fail quality probes

Violations in the quality of agricultural materials were becoming increasingly problematic, director of the Cultivation Department of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development Nguyen Tri Ngoc said yesterday in Ha Noi.

Ngoc said that 50 per cent of sampled fertilisers tested in 2009 were found to be lower in quality than required or stated by manufacturers. Also, thousands of tonnes of fake fertilisers were discovered in three trading cases in the same year.

In the first six months of this year, 138 out of 383 fertiliser samples tested were found to have failed quality requirements.

More seriously, only 3.6 per cent of 17,000 slaughterhouses in the country conform to modern industrial standards, with the remainder being family-sized businesses which are notoriously hard to monitor.

Only 7,200 slaughterhouses are currently managed by any responsible authority.

Dam Xuan Thanh, deputy director of Ha Nois Veterinary Department, said that northern provinces still lacked proper care for the planning and management of slaughterhouses, while southern provinces had already finished such policies.

Bui Sy Doanh, deputy director of the Department of Plant Protection, said that the high numbers of businesses producing and selling fertilisers and pesticides was the reason for the increase in agricultural material quality violations.

Some 25,000 businesses operated in this field with more than 1,000 product names registered, Doanh said. This caused management bodies difficulties in quality control and checks.

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Cao Duc Phat said it was necessary to make relevant bodies take responsibility for such violations. For example, the Department of Plant Protection must take the responsibility for bad quality pesticides.

He also said that there was an overlapping in legal documents on monitoring agricultural materials quality.

Phat emphasised the need to tackle the problem at its root, adding that if poor quality goods were found, relevant authorities needed to discover the producer. If such producers were found to have repeatedly broken regulations, their trading licence should be withdrawn.

He said that local authority must be assigned to manage fraud and quality control assessments of agricultural material production or trading.