Slow corn sales hit sellers
By Ngoc Hung - The Saigon Times Daily
HCMC - Vietnam has 12,000 tons of a popular corn seed in stock that it can’t sell to farmers because they have switched to a different strain.
Unfavorable weather this year has affected the summer crop in the south and the spring and spring-summer crops in the north, so corn growers didn’t buy the slow growing LVN10, instead switching to a faster growing strain of seed, according to Le Hung Quoc, general secretary of the Vietnam Seed Plant Association.
Corn farming covers about 1.1 million hectares in Vietnam with LVN10 accounting for 50-60%, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
Businesses trading in LVN10 are currently funded by bank loans. Now that they cannot sell their stocks, they have asked the Seed Plant Association to save them from going bankrupt.
The hybrid LVN10 that was created by the Corn Research Institute has high yields; is suited to Vietnamese conditions and is resistant to drought and disease. It takes 120 days to grow.