(VOVworld)- A supervisory team from the National Assembly Standing Committee and representatives from the government and ministries have discussed the implementation of a national target program on building new rural areas combined with agricultural restructuring over the past 5 years.

Farmers are harvesting rice (Photo: VNA)

At their meeting in Hanoi on Wednesday, participants said that by March this year Vietnam had more than 1,760 communes that met the criteria for new rural areas with annual income per capita reaching nearly 2,000 USD. The poverty rate was reduced from 17.4% to 8.2%. Phung Duc Tien, a member of the National Assembly’s Committee for Science, Technology and Environment, stressed the need of generating jobs for the rural workforce because vocational training and job generation are one of criteria for building new rural areas: “Currently, there is a movement to reserve farm land for large scale production. The new National Assembly Resolution stipulates that by 2020 40% of the workforce should be in the rural areas, while the current rate is 45%. If the farm land is accumulated without taking into account job generation for the people, problems will arise”.