According to Deputy Director of the Forestry Department Trieu Van Luc, in 2024, the Vietnamese forestry industry aims to achieve a growth rate of forest product export turnover of about 21.6% compared to 2023.
At the conference to review the forestry sector in 2023 and deploy tasks for 2024 of the Department of Forestry and the Department of Forestry held on the afternoon of December 27, Mr. Luc said that the sector will focus on developing a sustainable forestry economy in the direction of promoting the multi-use value of the forest ecosystem on the basis of effective management and use of forest resources; protecting and sustainably developing 100% of the existing forest area.
At the same time, the industry has diversified the types of forestry production and business organizations towards green, sustainable, and circular production. It has developed forms of association, cooperation, and benefit sharing in the forestry production and business chain.
The industry also strengthens the management of forestry seed quality, focuses on the selection and creation of forestry seed, native trees, and intensive forest cultivation suitable to the ecosystem to increase productivity and output of planted forests, and develop large-scale timber production forests. Thereby, contributing to achieving the target of 23 million m3 of timber exploitation output in 2024 and setting the target of wood and forest product export value at 17.5 billion USD.
Mr. Pham Van Dien, Principal of the Forestry University, also said that the industry has followed the forest plantation economy, so it needs to pay attention to forestry tree varieties. Therefore, scientists and researchers need to focus on research and selection of varieties not only for the development of forestry economy, but also for the development of scattered trees or ornamental plants.
According to the Department of Forestry, Vietnam's forestry product exports are estimated to reach 14.39 billion USD in 2023, down 15.8% compared to 2022.
The reason for the decrease is that the market has many unstable fluctuations, affected by the Russia-Ukraine political conflict, consumers in the US and European Union (EU) markets are tightening spending on non-essential products, including wood products.
Along with that, the policies of countries to protect domestically produced products and goods have affected the trade of Vietnamese wood products.
Therefore, to promote forest product trade, the forestry sector has proactively and regularly coordinated with associations and forest product processing and exporting enterprises to grasp the situation, advise the Ministry on solutions to remove difficulties for enterprises; monitor and coordinate to guide enterprises in implementing and handling international trade disputes.
In particular, 2023 marks a very important milestone when for the first time in Vietnam, the forestry sector has completed the procedures to successfully transfer the emission reduction of 10.3 million tons of carbon to the Forestry Carbon Partnership Fund through the World Bank (WB) at a unit price of 5 USD/ton of CO2 equivalent to 51.5 million USD.
To date, the Vietnam Forest Protection and Development Fund has received the first payment from the World Bank of 41.2 million USD and has disbursed the entire amount so that the provinces can urgently make payment plans for forest owners in 6 provinces in the North Central region including: Thanh Hoa, Nghe An, Ha Tinh, Quang Binh, Quang Tri, Thua Thien Hue.
In addition, 2023 is also affected by the El Nino phenomenon, with unusual weather, hot and dry weather, so the risk of forest fires is always high. There are still hot spots for deforestation, illegal trading and transportation of forest products in some localities, especially in the Northwest, Central Highlands, and South Central regions.
Meanwhile, the situation of specialized forest protection forces quitting their jobs is happening in many places, and many areas have difficulty recruiting new workers.
However, the forest rangers have proactively grasped the situation of hot spots and isolated key areas of deforestation, large storage and transfer points of forest products in key areas. From there, contributing to continuing to maintain the forest cover rate at 42.02%./.
Ly Ly
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