Rains help crops in southern Vietnam, flood north
HANOI - Farmers in southern Vietnam were blessed with good rains in June
although heavy downpours in the country's north
led to some flooding, officials and local media
said on Thursday.
A meteorological official in the key coffee
growing province of Daklak said average rainfall
last month was slightly lower than previous
years but this was just what farmers wanted.
``Daklak's rainfall in June is lower but it is fairly
good for the coffee trees which suffered from
the severe drought before the end of May,'' the
official told Reuters.
``Too much water would hurt the trees,'' he
said.
Coffee from Daklak, which lies in the south but
is officially a central highland province,
accounted for more than 60 percent of
Vietnam's 1997/98 crop of between
320,000-340,000 tonnes.
A state coffee grower and exporter in Daklak
said the rains had helped calm farmers' fears
after the drought.
The drought ended late last May, after causing
crop losses across the country estimated at
more than $385 million, official media have
reported. Tens of thousands of hectares of rice
and agricultural trees were destroyed.
The rains have not only cheered coffee growers
but also created favourable conditions for rice
cultivation in the southern Mekong Delta, the
country's rice bowl.
Vietnam is one of the world's top exporters of
rice and robusta coffee, commodities which
make important contributions to government
foreign exchange earnings.
``Harvesting of the summer-autumn crop will be
completed by August 5 and now is the time rice
trees need water to grow,'' a meteorologist in
southern An Giang province said. ``This has
been good rain for us and for the Mekong
Delta.''
He said average rainfall measured in An Giang,
a key rice producing province, was 180 mm in
June, 136 mm higher than the corresponding
figure the previous year.
The U.S. Weather Services Corporation said
on Thursday that showers covering up to 65
percent of Vietnam and Thailand had created
generally favourable conditions for crops.
Farmers in southern provinces have almost
completed transplanting young rice trees from
the summer-autumn crop on 1.7 million hectares
(4.2 million acres), an increase of nine percent
over the same crop last year, the official
Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported on
Thursday.
But while farmers in the south smile, heavy rains
in some northern provinces have raised water
levels in some rivers to so-called ``alarm'' levels.
Heavy rains in late June caused a flood which
destroyed infrastructure and food reserves in
northern Yen Bai province, VNA said.
An official from the Natural Disaster Control
Centre said authorities had been mobilised to
work around-the-clock to monitor water levels
along the giant Red River, which skirts the
capital Hanoi.
``...Our people are working 24 hours in shifts to
keep a close check on dykes,'' he said.
Vietnam has a series of river dykes to protect
against flooding.
One official said dyke breaches along the Red
River were inevitable as water levels in northern
tributaries rose.
In addition, the Hoa Binh hydropower plant's
reservoir, the country's biggest and which lies
70 km (44 miles) from Hanoi, had opened
several gates to release excess water.
This contrasts with the critically low water levels
recorded at the Hoa Binh reservoir at the end of
May, showing just how plentiful the rains have
been.
REUTERS, July 2, 1998.
|