Agricultural land has a special position and importance in terms of politics, economy and society with Vietnam – a country with agricultural traditions. Policies and laws on agricultural land make an important contribution to the realization of the revolution’s goals through each period and to the outstanding achievements of the “Doi Moi” period. However, in the period of comprehensive promotion of “Doi Moi” and international integration, our country’s agriculture industry is facing enormous challenges, which is easy to see that low labor productivity makes agricultural production costs more expensive and difficult to compete with similar products of other countries in the region. On the other hand, the process of building a new countryside, industrialization and modernization of agriculture faces many difficulties due to the fragmentation of arable land; production scale of households is still small … This is due to the fact that the policies and laws on agricultural land are not suitable or inadequate in response to the requirements of the times. One of them is the inadequacy of enterprises’ access to land.
According to a recent study by Assoc. Vu Thi Minh & MSc. Luu Duc Khai, the survey results showed that most enterprises (78.5%) believe that enterprises maintain production scale as usual, 15.2% of enterprises have plans to expand their business. The rest reduce production scale, suspend or close, or dissolve. This shows that agricultural enterprises are facing many difficulties and barriers in doing business; specifically:
Firstly, enterprises said that there are many reasons leading to production reduction, temporary suspension or closure, such as not being able to borrow capital (40%), not being able to find output markets (40%), raw material prices, etc. high input material (29.4%); unable to recruit workers as required (20%), unstable macroeconomic environment (20%) and want to switch to other business lines (7.7%) … One of the problems that The difficulties faced by enterprises in accessing land have not been improved even though many related policies have been issued. Up to 63% of enterprises have difficulty in accessing land while the situation has not improved much. This shows that access to land is a major barrier for agricultural enterprises.
Secondly, according to the assessment of agricultural enterprises, there is almost no significant progress in land access. The percentage of enterprises rated “better” was almost unchanged and remained at about 10%; while the percentage of enterprises rated “poor” increased from 6.3% to 7.8%. About 50% of enterprises rated land services as “no change” and over one-third of enterprises “didn’t know” about land services. This means that enterprises must “swim themselves” when they want to expand their premises for production and business; Because in addition to capital, labor and science and technology, space is also a prerequisite for enterprises to expand their production and business scale. This is really a bottleneck in the operation of agricultural enterprises.
Thirdly, at present, most of the agricultural land is allocated to households and individuals for stable and long-term use, so there is not much of this land that the State is managing to lease to businesses for the purpose. Agriculture. With the current average size of small and fragmented land (about 4,280 m2/household on average), businesses have to sign contracts with dozens or even hundreds of farming households to have enough land to develop their own land. implementation of agricultural projects. In this case, the agreement, negotiation and compensation is very difficult, complicated and lengthy because many households offer too high compensation. To access land, businesses have to spend a lot of time, effort and money. In order to overcome this difficulty, some localities such as Ha Nam, Thai Binh …, the People’s Committee of the commune come to an agreement with households on the conversion of agricultural land, then sign contracts for the farmers. rental business. However, from a legal perspective, this behavior is not in accordance with the provisions of the Land Law 2013.
Fourthly, in business in general and business in agriculture in particular, in order to develop, enterprises must invest in commercializing and modernizing production from determining market demand to product planning to the beginning. invest in advanced and modern science and technology into production, etc. Therefore, actively producing on the basis of accumulation and concentration of land for large-scale production is a necessary condition. The fact that the current land law does not allow economic organizations to receive the transfer of rice land use rights of households and individuals engaged in agricultural production limits the concentration of land. Meanwhile, in fact, the conversion and concentration of land in the form of large farms and fields has been carried out in some localities, but it is still on a small scale and has not created a strong motivation for businesses. industry as well as people; contract break is still happening.
Fifthly, the 2013 Land Law was amended and supplemented in the direction of building enterprises’ right to access land more suitable to the market mechanism. Objects whose land is recovered by the State for land allocation or lease has been narrowed down; Accordingly, the State recovers land to use for the purpose of socio-economic development for the national and public interests as specified in Article 62. However, in the condition that land resources are limited. and difficult to concentrate like now, only high-tech agricultural projects will be given priority to access clean land. Thus, businesses are screened and have to compete with each other to get clean land for business.
Sixthly, the regulations on land incentives for enterprises to invest in the agricultural sector were issued, but the implementation resources were limited, so few enterprises took advantage of the opportunities. In order to have land for business use, enterprises must promote linkages with farmer households in the form of investment enterprises and farmer households contributing land. However, the difficulty is the harmonious settlement of interests between the parties in this production linkage model; especially the release of the mentality of keeping land to ensure the livelihoods of farmers in the event of unforeseen circumstances as well as the compliance with contracts so that businesses can feel secure doing business on that associated land.
References:
- Nguyen Quang Tuyen, Policy on management and use of agricultural land to encourage concentration and accumulation of land in the context of industrialization and modernization of the country, Proceedings of the Seminar on theoretical basis and practice of amending the Land Law 2013, Hanoi National University, 2021.
- Vu Thi Minh & Luu Duc Khai, Presentation report on problems in accessing land of enterprises, Seminar on Policy to encourage accumulation and concentration of agricultural land in the process of agricultural and rural industrialization by the Central Economic Commission – Department of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development – Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Development, January 10, 2017, Hanoi.
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