HA NOI — The agriculture sector will put in maximum efforts to increase the area of hybrid rice to 70 per cent of the country’s total rice area by 2010, said Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Bui Ba Bong in a meeting of the ministry on Wednesday held to discuss the result of the winter-spring rice harvest.
In order to meet this goal, he suggested mobilising large enterprises to get involved in the production of hybrid rice seeds so as to reduce the import volume of hybrid rice every year, which stands at about 13,000 tonnes at the moment.
To do this, the country will have to increase by one-and-a-half times the current area of rice fields. According to Nguyen Tri Hoan, deputy director of the Food Crops Research Institute, the task is a difficult one to achieve as the timeline set is too short and firms producing rice seed have not expressed any interest in hybrid rice.

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