Quarantine fees press upon farmers

Quarantine fees press upon farmers

 An egg has to experience five quarantine times since it leaves the farm to reach the market. Having eggs quarantined just means bringing eggs to vets to pay fees.

Fees push the cost prices up

Le Trong Vu in Hoa Thanh district of Tay Ninh province said he has to bear too many kinds of fee on the duck quarantine, though he has to follow strict procedures during the breeding already.

According to the farmer, after ducks are hatched, he has to report to the local veterinary agency and buy the form to apply for selling ducklings. The quarantine fee is 5 dong per duckling. After that, until the ducks get 15 days old, Vu has to vaccinate the ducks against some diseases, costing about 1000 dong per duck.

When ducks grow up enough to be sold on the market, Vu has to follow necessary procedures to sell ducklings to the establishments outside the district, which costs 100,000 dong per consignment of products. Besides, he also has to pay 500,000 dong for the ducks’ blood testing

If Vu wants to sell the products to the establishments outside the province, he would have to repeat the same procedures once more, for the fifth time, which costs 200,000 dong per consignment (each consignment comprises of 700-800 ducklings), or 1500-2000 dong per duckling.

In general, the quarantine fees account for 20 percent of the sale prices of 9000-10,000 dong per duck.

Nguyen Thanh Son, Deputy Head of the Livestock Husbandry Department under the Ministry of Agriculture and Development, has confirmed that farmers and farm produce companies have been complaining about the “quarantine fee burden”.

According to Son, an egg has to experience five quarantine times since it leaves the farm to reach consumers, with the fee of 50 dong per egg each time. Farmers can get 1500 dong when selling an egg, while they have to pay 250 dong for the quarantine procedures.

He believes that this is really a big problem which does not encourage livestock farming, adding that the department has asked for the adjustment of the regulations relating to the quarantine fee.

Meanwhile, Le Hong Quy in Soc Trang province, who sells 4000-5000 eggs a day to merchants from HCM City, Binh Duong and Ca Mau, said that it takes him too much time to follow necessary formalities to be able to sell eggs to the merchants from other localities. Therefore, Quy only has the eggs quarantined, if the partners require the quarantine certificates.

Nguyen Thi Huan, Director of Ba Huan Company Ltd, said she has to pay 4.5-5.5 dong for every egg quarantined after collecting eggs from farms. Besides, the company also has to spend 5000 dong to buy a quarantine certificate for the consignments to be sold within HCM City, and 30,000 dong a certificate for the products to be sold to other localities.

Quarantining simply means “calculating money”

The farmers in Soc Trang, Bac Lieu and Tien Giang have also complained that poultry products bear overly high fees of quarantine, which pushes up the production costs.

Meanwhile, they believe that the quarantine would not help find out unsafe products. Veterinary agencies send staff to the farms to take samples for testing, while enterprises have to pay 200,000 dong for every time. In general, vets simply “count eggs to calculate fees.”

According to Nguyen Van Bay, a senior executive of CP Vietnam, said that if carrying eggs from Khanh Hoa province in the central region to Hanoi in the north, the company’s officers would have to go to local quarantine stations to have quarantine certificates, when they pass through every province. Besides, they have to pay 50,000 dong in decontamination fee each time.

vietnamnews