The 19^th annual meeting of the Asian Farmers’ Group for Cooperation (AFGC) is taking place at the Da Nang-based Grand Mercure Hotel until tomorrow, 21 March.

Vice Chairman of the municipal People's Committee of Le Trung Chinh delivering welcome address at the 19th AFGC meeting

Attending the 2-day event are a total of 40 representatives from India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand, along with leaders of Vietnamese ministries and the Cooperative Alliances in the south Central Viet Nam.

Hosted by the Viet Nam Cooperative Alliance, this year’s event has ‘The role of farmers’ cooperative organisations in addressing challenges of climate change for Asian farmers’ as its theme.

The 3-day event is an opportunity for member organisations to better identify emerging challenges and issues during the development process of cooperative economy and cooperatives in Asia, and in the world as a whole.

In his remarks at the opening ceremony this morning, municipal People's Committee Vice Chairman Le Trung Chinh highly appreciated the high practicality of the event which, thereby, suggests many orientations and solutions to enhance agricultural production capacity of the AFGC member countries through the operation of farmers' economic organisations, with cooperatives being a typical model.

The delegates attending the 19th AFGC meeting

Vice Chairman Chinh said that Da Nang boasts great hi-tech agriculture application potential. In particular, many preferential policies have been released to realise the city’s goal of establishing a hi-tech agricultural zone by 2025, with a focus on developing cooperatives.

Da Nang is now home to 47 agricultural cooperatives out of the total 121 operating in various aspects. These units have partly helped to boost the development of the agriculture to enhance the material and spiritual life of farmers, ensure social security, political stability, as well as made great efforts for promoting rural upgrade programmes.

Under the AFGC meeting 2019’s agenda, participants share their countries’ experiences in developing agricultural cooperative models associated with value chains and the hi-tech application into agricultural development activities and the One Commune One Product (OCOP) model.

After the opening session, there were reports by the participating delegates on such main issues as the climate change challenges for the agricultural sector in Asian monsoon region, the production of biomass and biogas, and efforts to cope with the impacts of climate change on farmers.