FAO honours Vietnamese farmer

(VNF) - The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Vietnam and the FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific will present the Model Farmer Award to Pham Thi Huan for her outstanding agricultural production achievements in the context of increasing climate change challenges.

Mrs. Huan checking eggs at her egg processing plant in Ho Chi Minh City. (Photo: bahuan.vn)

Mrs. Pham Thi Huan, from Long An province, will receive a “Model Farmer” award along with others from Fiji, Mongolia, Pakistan and Thailand to mark FAO’s annual World Food Day (WFD) celebrations in the Asia-Pacific region.

This year, the awards, to be presented in Bangkok on behalf of FAO regional office by Thailand’s Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn on October 17^th, recognize achievements under the theme “Climate is changing, food and agriculture must too”.

This WFD 2016 theme highlights how food and agriculture need to adapt to climate change to feed a growing global population in a sustainable way.

Mrs. Pham Thi Huan (or Ba Huan) gets FAO awards for helping farmers in the Mekong Delta region shift from planting rice to raising duck for eggs. Her efforts have helped create jobs for many women farmers after they had to restructure crop production to adapt to climate change.

Mrs. Huan, whose contributions have also been recognized by the Vietnamese Government, has engaged in numerous other local support programmes such as “Support Association for People with Disabilities and Orphans” and “Everyone is the Same”. She has also participated in Ho Chi Minh Television’s “Dream House” programme during the past decade to help farmers with initial capital to establish businesses.

Mrs. Huan spoke at the ground-breaking ceremony for an egg processing plant in Hanoi on May 12^th, 2016. (Photo: phuctho.hanoi.gov.vn)

Mrs. Huan also has invested in building an egg processing plant on 2 hectares in Phuc Tho district, Hanoi with an investment of USD 5.2 million. The plant can process 65,000 clean eggs per hour.

Construction started in May this year and the plant is expected to be operational in early next year. It will help poultry farmers in Hanoi find an outlet for their products by purchasing a large quantity of eggs from them.

Before her, Mrs. Nguyen Thi Thu was honoured as model farmer in the field of integrated agriculture in 2008./.

Minh Phuong