Vietnamese Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong has called on the central province Thanh Hoa’s Muong Lat district to take measures to reduce poor households and boost its GDP in rural area. He made the statement during a two-day visit to the district, one of the country’s poorest areas, to see how the implementation of the Party Central Committee’s Resolution 26 NQ/TW on agriculture was going. Sharing a 100km border with Laos’s Hua Phan Province, the mountainous Muong Lat district has a population of about 34,000, including 46.2% from ethnic Thai and 39.8% from Mong. Eight out of the nine communes in the district are now connected to the national grid, while all now have health clinics and are accessible by car thanks to the implementation of the resolution. Muong Lat authorities are calling on the government to prioritize capital to its infrastructure projects, in addition to formulating preferential policies for public employees working in disadvantaged areas. During his visit, the Party leader also toured Trung Ly and Muong Chanh communes and presented gifts to several poor households. In 2011, Vietnam will spend nearly VND1.81 trillion ($87 million) on a sustainable poverty reduction program and targets to cut the poverty rate to between 4%-5% by 2020 from 9.45% in 2010. (Vietnam News Sept 5, Nong Nghiep Viet Nam – Vietnam Agriculture Sept 3)
