The province is now home to 70 products certified by the One Commune, One Product (OCOP) programme. It also has over 3,500ha of fruits and more than 560ha of vegetables, nearly 2,000 fishing cages and 22 breeding facilities certified as meeting standards, which is an advantage in selling local farm produce to Hanoi. Several concentrated vegetable cultivation areas have been formed with about 20 cooperatives and enterprises awarded food safety certificates, which supply about 6,900 tonnes of produce each year to the market.

At the meeting, the FPT group proposed a project with the aim of turning Hoa Binh into a so-called "kitchen” of Hanoi, which would be implemented by its subsidiary Sen Do joint Stock Company. The project has a total investment of 500 billion VND, comprising six items and two stages. Most of the capital would be used for marketing, branding and developing 1,000 safe vegetable selling points in Hanoi. In the first stage, to be implemented from the fourth quarter of this year to the first quarter of next year, safe vegetable cultivation will be piloted in Luong Son and nearby areas with an estimated output of 2-5 tonnes each day to supply for stores in Hanoi and a farm produce procurement and processing centre will be built in Luong Son. In the second stage, the supply scale will be expanded gradually to 100 tonnes per day.

FPT Group asked the province to assist in building brands for farm produce and planning cultivation areas in order to ensure large-scale supply of produce with good quality. In the immediate future, it hoped for support in land to build working office, transportation and mechanisms for project implementation.

Vice Chairman Su vowed all possible support for the investor and asked the group to soon complete the detailed project and work with departments and agencies to conduct surveys for the building of the farm produce procurement and processing centre in Luong Son.

He also instructed the provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development to work with FPT Group to implement the project, firstly forming joint-ventures with several cooperatives specialising in safe vegetable cultivation to make use of available resources. Departments and agencies were required to partner with people’s committees of cities, districts and FPT Group to build quality production areas, expand production scale, toward increasing the supply of fruits, aquatic products and meat for the group’s farm produce retail system./.