Craft villages on the threshold of WTO
Viet Nam News, Vietnam
(09-12-2006)
Vice President of the Viet Nam Association of Traditional Craft Villages, Luu Duy Dan, spoke to (Vietnam Economic Times) about handicraft villages and the WTO.
The government has high lighted the conservation and promotion of traditional craft villages in its policy. What are your thoughts on that?
Up to 73 per cent of the country’s population live in rural areas. In some localities, the figure gets as high as 90 per cent. But the real problem lies in the fact that their cultivated land is dwindling. In the last six years, some 300,000 ha of cultivated land was used for other purposes. As a result, about 3.7 million farmers don’t have land to cultivate. This requires us to promote the development of traditional handicrafts to generate jobs for farmers whose land had been revoked for other reasons.
Recently, the Prime Minister issued Decree 66/2006/ND-CP on July 7, 2006 on the development of village traditional handicrafts.
The Decree emphasised the importance of conservation and development of the traditional handicrafts.
Do you think the traditional handicraft villages fit in with requirements for building a new rural image?
Results of a recent survey indicated that 32 per cent of the 2,017 handicraft villages nation wide were doing well; 42 per cent were surviving and 26 per cent were on the verge of disappearing.
One reason leading to this situation is the poor awareness of local people and a lack of focus from the concerned authorities.
In many villages, high quality products were not deemed to be of great concern. Because of this, they haven’t utilised high technology in their production or diversified their product patterns.
Many export opportunities await the handicraftmen as Viet Nam has become a WTO member. What are your recommendations?
If they want to have many high value products exported, there is no other way than to have a diverse range of products to meet the tastes of clients in each market.
In my opinion, traditional handicraft villages are facing three barriers – capital, market and technology.
Unfortunately the number of artisans is decreasing while the younger workers are not skilled enough. Their businesses are usually too small and their products are quite often of a poor quality, it makes it difficult for them to compete with other countries. What they need to do right now is to improve their production facilities and create their own brand names.
Having a good brand name though is not enough, they have to develop a market strategy domestically and internationally.
So what’s the role of the association in helping the craft villages in the work of conservation and development?
Though the association was set up more than a year ago, with support from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Ministry of Home Affairs we have successfully gathered many well-known artisans and researchers and managers to discuss and initiate measures to conserve and promote traditional handicrafts.
We have helped many handicraftmen understand opportunities and challenges that they have to cope with when the country joins the WTO.
We have provided them with information and helped them in trade promotion, tourism culture and capacity building in business development. — VNS