Life for minority people has improved with socio-economic growth
Feb. 12 (VNA) -- Life for the minority people of Central Highlands Dac Lac province has much improved during the past decade as a result of its remarkable achievements in every sector, but especially in the economic, social, educational and cultural areas.
Official statistics show that Dac Lac's Gross Domestic Product, GDP, growth last year was 1.9 percent above 1995 and three times more than 1990.
The province has achieved yearly agriculture-forestry growth of 15.2 percent and industry and construction growth of 11.2 percent during the past five years.
One of the four Central Highlands provinces, Dac Lac is of 19,530 sq.km and has a population of 1.8 million, including more than 514,000 minority people or about 30 percent of the local population.
It is Viet Nam's major coffee producer and coffee planting has increased from 54,000 ha in 1990 to 250,000 ha in 2000. Dac Lac is also Viet Nam's biggest cotton grower with 10,200 ha under cultivation last year, 10,000 ha more than 1990.
New farming methods introduced to minority groups has helped change them from slash-and-burn to sedentary farmers with their products surging in both quantity and quality.
The latest survey shows that about 77 percent of minority households have adopted the new farming methods and 51 percent of these emerged from poverty last year.
Dac Lac's wet-rice cultivation increased to more than 50,600 ha with an average yield of 5.5 tonnes per ha last year from about 200 ha with the liberation of southern Viet Nam in 1975.
The province is now self-sufficient in food and minority people practise wet-rice farming as well as growing coffee and other high-profit cash crops such as rubber, pepper and cotton.
Its area for long-term industrial crops now totals 302,000 ha, or 57 percent of farm land with as much as 98 percent of its export turnover earned from these crops.
A variety of infrastructure development programmes over the past ten years have provided Dac Lac with a new look. In 2000 alone, State budget spendings for local infrastructure development totalled VND 405 billion, a ten-fold rise over 1991.
The money was used to build about 8,500 km of roads; schools, power stations, irrigation systems, medical clinics and markets. Now, 99 percent of its communes have roads into the town centre and 157 have electricity, 64 percent of its population have access to clean water.
Dac Lac was recognized in 1999 for completing the universalisation of primary education and eradicating illiteracy. The province now has 8,000 classrooms with an average of 2.7 of its people having gone to school.--VNA
