Nearly 12 percent of the winter spring rice harvest in northern Vietnam will be seriously affected by drought this year, a state-run newspaper reported on Thursday, citing a government report. The impact of the El Nino phenomenon would be felt until about April, and "as a result, rainfall in the northern provinces will continue to decrease by 20 to 30 percent", the Vietnam News quoted Le Thanh Hai, director of the National Centre for Hydrometeorology Forecasting, as saying.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development said the lack of rain would hit output and could result in a bad harvest on nearly 80,000 hectares (197,700 acres) of crop land, the newspaper said. Rice is grown on 7.4 million hectares of land throughout Vietnam, according to government statistics.
Vietnam is the world's second biggest exporter of the grain after Thailand, but rice produced in the north goes predominantly towards feeding the country's population of 86 million people. Last year, the northern winter-spring crop accounted for about 18 percent of Vietnam's total output, statistics showed. The drought is so severe that the Red River, which cuts through the capital, Hanoi, was at its lowest point in more than a century, and reservoirs in some parts of the north were running dry, state media have reported.
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