Hanoi has invested millions of US dollars in hi-tech agricultural projects. However, at least two of these projects sit idle through planning failures.

Hanoi’s first hi-tech agricultural park at present.

Weeds cover Hanoi’s first hi-tech agricultural park

Five years after its grand opening, Hanoi’s first hi-tech agricultural park moulders in a sunken area vulnerable to flooding and surrounded by new residential buildings.

Hanoi officials attended the inauguration ceremony of the city’s first high technology agricultural development project in Tu Liem district on October 10, 2004. Investment capital reached nearly 20 billion dong (US$1.4 million), including 12 billion from Hanoi’s budget for infrastructure. Management responsibility was assigned to the Technical Centre for Vegetable, Flowers and Fruits, now the Hanoi Agricultural Investment and Development Company (Hadico), a state enterprise. Hadico paid the remaining eight billion dong to import 8000 square meters of glass from Israel.

The greenhouses were equipped with state-of-the-art devices to collect data on temperature, light, and plant nutritional levels and report the results to a server. The server analyzed the information and decided how to care for the plants automatically.

An investor confirms that agricultural productivity in the park was up to ten times higher than the average. A hectare of tomatoes could yield 250 to 300 tons per year and sweet chilies could yield up to 200 tons. The enterprise was capable of earning annual revenue of 2-3 billion dong per hectare, not the 50 million dong per hectare that the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development expected.

Regrettably, the 8000 square meter greenhouse facility is now a battlefield of weeds. All the ultra-modern devices inside the structures have ceased operating. No one could imagine that just a few years ago this was once a hi-tech agricultural park that hosted hundreds of groups of visitors.

Hadico’s Chairman and General Director, Phan Minh Nguyet, explained to Tien Phong newspaper that the Hanoi authorities have decided to move this park to Tay Tuu commune in Tu Liem district in order to use the present site as a residential area. Hadico will move its glass buildings and transfer the land to the new investors.

“We can take the frames and equipment with us, not the net and glass,” Nguyet says.

An 11 billion dong abattoir sits idle

The Hanoi government also assigned Hadico to build and operate modern slaughterhouses. In late June 2007, the company built a state-of-the-art poultry slaughterhouse in Minh Khai commune in Tu Liem district. It cost 11 billion dong (nearly $750,000) and was capable of processing 700 chickens per hour.

At the opening ceremonies, Le Quy Don, Hanoi’s former Vice Chairman, proclaimed this to be an ideal model for future facilities throughout city.

Now the slaughterhouse stands idle. It operated only briefly, Nguyet explains, because it didn’t have enough customers. Slaughtering a chicken at a private slaughterhouse costs only 2000 dong, but the new, modern facility must charge 5000 dong to recoup operating, quarantine and depreciation costs.

Nguyet says that Hadico is waiting for the city to build a sufficient number of modern slaughterhouses and then close down all private and unhygienic facilities. He doesn’t know when this will happen, however, because these plans are still at the discussion stage.

Though the poultry processing mill has been closed for nearly two years, every month Hadico has to pay hundreds of million dong in interest to banks. Nguyet says the facility will be relocated from its present location in a residential area to another site some time in the next several years.

VietNamNet/Tien Phong