Vietnam to set up portal to track agricultural products origin

Vietnam plans to create a national portal to keep track of the origins of agricultural produce and provide other data.

A farmer with newly harvested shallots in the central province of Quang Ngai, September 9, 2019. Photo by VnExpress/Thanh Nguyen.

Nguyen Hoang Linh, deputy director general of the Ministry of Science and Technology's General Department of Metrology and Measurement Quality, said at a seminar on Monday that the portal is scheduled to be operational by 2025. "But we are trying to finish it before that."

The portal will provide information on products' and goods' origin using a system that links ministries, agencies, organizations, businesses, and international systems.

Linh said the proposed national standard on organic agricultural products would provide a common standard for production, processing and labeling of organic agricultural products such as crops and livestock, and spell out the requirements for organizations that evaluate and provide organic certification.

At the seminar, experts from Canada, Switzerland, India, and other member countries of the Asian Productivity Organization (APO) spoke about the growing trend of using web-based organic smart agricultural technologies and intelligent traceability systems that were developed by U.S., E.U. and Indian regulatory agencies.

APO member countries would help Vietnam improve its legal system and infrastructure to enable smart agricultural production and organic agriculture associated with traceability, and ensure its agricultural products meet technical standards and its certifying agencies achieve international acceptance, Linh added.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development seeks to turn Vietnam into one of world's top 15 organic farming countries by 2030, having 7-10 percent of the farming area in the country under organic crops by then.