Dairy Production in Vietnam : Opportunities and Challenges

Dairy cow raising in Vietnam has been assessed as a key occupation to neet the sosiety\u27s denabd for high nutritive food products and to improve cash income for farmers. The overall objective of the study thus is to examine the development of dairy production in the country over last years, and then to point out its opportunities and challenges to have a good strategy for next development. The reseach results are mostly based on secondary data collected from different sources. Descriptive statistical analysis is used as the principal methods of the study. The research results show that the nubmer of dairy cows and milk yield in Vietnam have trended upwards during the last decade, but they still seem to be too small compared with those in neighbor countries. Although the level of milk consumption in Vietnam is low, the national dair production at present meets only nearly 12% of the total domestic consumption. There are some favorable factors which give opportunities for the development of Vietnamese dairy sub-sector, i.e. large market potential, encouraging policies of the government, abundant labor force, benefits of dairy raising and achived progresses in crossbred activities. However, it has faced with a lot of challenges such as a lack of good cow breeds, limitedlevel of farm management, poor status of veterinary services, high price of feeds and environmental pollution