The Administration of Forestry’s Financial and Planning Department submitted a proposal to decrease the amount of protected forests while increasing the size of tree plantations across the country. If approved, this poses a serious threat to Vietnam’s forests.
 
Nguyen Nghia Bien, director of the department, defends the proposal stating that reducing the number of protected forests is essential to “make the forestry sector an engine for economic growth.” According to him, protective forests should only be maintained in areas near upstream parts of long rivers and large reservoirs. Reducing the amount of protected forests would result in more land available for tree plantations.
 
Land reserved for forestry makes up half of Vietnam’s total land. Unfortunately, its contribution to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is low due to the fact that most forests are scattered all over the country and tree plantations are struggling to raise its productivity. Thus, the forestry restructuring plan of the department which targets a growth rate of 4-4.5 percent based on an “effective use of land and financial resources.”
 
Bien offered several proposals for the forestry restructuring plan of the department. He advocated a new way of forest classification that was more in line with international practice while helping to increase the sector’s efficiency and management at the same time. According to him, protective forests should be divided into two parts instead of the current three categories: protective forests, and tree plantations of productive forests. Tree plantations should allow trees to grow for more than 10 years in order to increase the economic productivity of trees that are cultivated for timber. Moreover, Bien suggested that plantations should focus more on growing trees to be used for timber rather than for wood chips. He is aiming for a 25 percent revenue from environmental services fee into the forestry sector’s total value by 2020.
 
Ha Cong Tuan meanwhile, deputy director of Vietnam Administration of Forestry, proposed for more people-friendly policies that make it easier for them to get access to preferential credits to develop forests in order to generate more income for forest growers in a short-term basis. This is because banks have stricter requirements and lower loan limits to financing the forestry sector, due to the risk of forestry activities having longer investment cycles.
 
But on the bright side, state budget funding for forestry increased by VND 450 billion (US $21.6 million) this year, to a total of VND 1.2 trillion (US $57.6 million).