Building New-Style Rural Areas in Dien Bien’s Ethnic Minority, Border Regions

The PM has issued Decision No. 1573/Q?-TTG approving a project on building new-style rural areas in the ethnic minority and border regions in the northern mountainous province of Dien Bien. The project covers a total area of nearly 338,021 hectares in Dien Bien’s 29 communes, with 12 in Dien Bien district, three in Muong Cha district, eight in Nam Po district and six in Muong Nhe district. It will be implemented from 2016 to 2020 with the goal of promoting new-style rural area building in association with rapid and sustainable poverty reduction, aiming to help communes in the regions to step by step meet the national criteria for new-style rural areas; upgrading fundamental infrastructure; improving the living standard of local people; building and protecting solid and friendly border areas; and safeguarding national defence and security, contributing to defending national border sovereignty in Dien Bien. The project targets all communes of the province meet at least ten criteria of new-style rural areas by 2020, with seven communes expected to meet all the 19 criteria, two with 16 criteria, one with 14 criteria, five with 13 criteria, five with 12 criteria, seven with 11 criteria and two with ten criteria. In order to achieve the abovementioned goals, the project will accelerate the planning progress of centralized production zones, allocate farming production land and forest land for local people, protect and build new forests, and encourage enterprises to strongly develop cultivation zones for industrial use plants. At the same time, the new-style cooperative model will been facilitated in the form of joint ventures to expand business according to the product value chains in agricultural production. The project also seeks to boost the application of scientific and technological advances to production and accelerate the progress of mechanization in farming production, contributing to increasing the crops’ output.