(VOVworld) – The National Assembly’s Committee for Social Affairs has proposed various activities to reduce poverty in ethnic minority areas. This is aimed at achieving sustainable poverty reduction.

Women of the Dao and Tay ethnic groups in Tuyen Quang province are trained to sew by machine

The number of poor households in extremely disadvantaged communes and hamlets reduced from 47% in 2006 to 28.8% in 2010. However, the poverty rate in the northwestern mountain region is 2.97 times higher than the national level. The rate is 1.81 times in the northeastern region and 1.56 times in the northern central and central highlands regions. Poor ethnic minority households make up half the number of poor households nationwide.

The situation is attributed to unsustainable poverty reduction and the gap between the rich and the poor in different regions and communities, especially in the northern mountain and central highlands regions.

Avoiding overlapped policies

The Ministry of Labor, Invalids, and Social Affairs says ineffective poverty reduction results are resulted from overlapped policies on poverty reduction and ethnic minority communities in particular. Policy implementation in some localities fails to link production assistance, technology transfer, environmental protection, and investment attraction. Resources for poverty reduction have not been coordinated. Pham Thi Hai Chuyen, Minister of Labor, Invalids, and Social Affairs, said more long-term policies for mountainous regions are needed. “More support will be given to especially poor localities. We will allocate resources for poor communes and districts for medium-term investment in transport, service and production infrastructure. We’ll gradually reduce and replace direct assistance with incentive policies such as vocational training and production loans. We’ll also categorize unfortunate people to provide suitable assistance.”

Appropriate land allocation for housing and production

The shortage of housing and production land for ethnic minority people has affected poverty reduction efforts. The reasons are attributed to population pressure, land acquisition for public projects, natural disasters, and limited land reserve. Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Cao Duc Phat says: “The first obstacle is land resource. We’ll rezone state-owned farms and forests to allocate parts of the land to ethnic minority communities. Localities have acquired some 800,000 hectares of forestry land. Some localities have given land to ethnic minority people to plant forests. Since 2005, nearly 120,000 ha of forests have been entrusted to 5,400 ethnic households. We’ll continue to help them to obtain higher profits from afforestation. We’ll encourage them to develop non-agricultural production.”

Besides re-allocating production land for ethnic minority groups, the government will reserve sufficient resources for poverty reduction projects in ethnic minority communities including vocational training and job generation.