While the Mekong Delta province of Kien Giang has zoned off 1,200 hectares for high-quality rice, Ho Chi Minh City’s neighboring province of Long An will focus on growing another kind of high-quality rice, Nang Thom Cho Dao.

The Kien Giang Province People's Committee has also given the green light to Kien Giang Agro-Forestry Co Ltd to invest in the specialized rice-growing area for high quality rice meeting the VietGap standard for export only.

Around 40 percent of the 1,.200ha area will be contracted to local farmers, and as a resultso that there will be some 3,000 idled local workers to be employed for every crop.

According to Kien Giang Province authorities, the rice-growing project area will follow the "large-scale rice field model", ensuring a closed chain of seed supply, rice production, milling, and export. As planned, the project will be implemented from the coming winter-spring crop in Q3/2012.

The Long An Province government has also taken athe similar move inwhen adopting the "large-scale rice field model” for its specialty, the Nang Thom Cho Dao rice, said Le Minh Duc, dDirector of the municipal Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Accordingly, the 100-hectare field includeswith an initial investment of VND3 billion ($144,000), which will covering the costs of 100 percent of high-quality certified seed, and fertilizers, and 30 percent of pesticides for local farmers to followtowards high-quality and safety farming practices.

The harvestedproduct of Nang Thom Cho Dao rice will be packaged with a brand name and certificate of origin so that consumers can feel secured after buying it, while avoiding the rampant fake rice on the market.

Long An province will continue to expand the areas of rice production for the rice variety in My Le Commune in Can Duoc District, because its quality can only be maintained when being grown there.

Earlyier last month, Le Van Banh, director of the Mekong Delta Research Institute, said at a conference that after a two-year pilot project, the number farming areas applying this model has increased, but the quality is not as high as expected.

The large-scale rice field model is said to be a prerequisite for sustainable development of the rice industry in the Mekong Delta, he said at the “Joint rice production under the large-scale rice field model” conference organized in the Mekong Delta province of An Giang..

“In the 2011 summer-autumn crop, 7,800 hectares of rice growing areas joined the model, meeting 93 percent of the plan (8,370 hectares), but forin the 2011-2012 winter-spring crop, the figure increased to over 19,720 hectares, versus 18,880 targeted for the plan, meeting 104 percent,” said Le Thanh Tung, an expert from the Cultivation Department under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Tung saidinformed the Cultivation Department is striving to raise the size of farming areas applying the large-scale rice field model to one million hectares in the near future.coming time.

Although the scale large-scale rice field areas isare constantly growing,rising, Banh stressed that such a figure is still very low compared to the huge potentials of this model.

“Over 20,000 high-quality hectares joining the model versus 1.6 million hectares of paddy produced each crop is too modest,” said Banh.