October 10, 2012

 

  

Several Danish companies are willing to invest in Vietnam's pig breeding industry as there is much potential for business development.

 

This was according to Jeppe Solmer, trade official of the Danish Embassy in the Southeast Asian country.

 

Some Danish investors want to export high-yield piglets to Vietnam, while other companies are ready to build pig breeding facilities, providing high-quality piglets for local swine farms as well as modern production and veterinary technologies, Solmer said at a seminar on cooperation in swine industry between the two countries.

 

Vietnamese enterprises can send their staff to learn management skills as well as production technologies in Denmark, the trade representative said at the seminar in Hanoi on October 8.

 

Denmark, whose population is 5.6 million people in 2011, has 5,000 farms producing 28 million pigs annually, 90% of which are exported worldwide, said Christian Villumsen, a representative of DanBred International Association.

 

As Vietnam's swine industry is still using out-dated technologies, which in turn gives low productivity, there are plenty of opportunities for foreign investors, said the Livestock Husbandry Department under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD).

 

Vietnam has 8,900 medium-size swine farms and millions of household-scale facilities, the department said.

 

Vietnam targets to raise the pig herd to 33.2 million in 2015 from 27.1 million in 2011. Accordingly, the live weight is expected to hit four million tonnes by the year from 3.1 million tonnes last year.

 

To make the targets reachable, the MARD will import a large number of pig parents, grandparents and great -grandparents with higher quality which the locally-produced herds fail to meet.

 

The country strives to increase the number of foreign-sourced pigs to 8.88 million by 2015 from 6.34 million in 2011.