An Giang woos investors through its conducive investment climate.
Endowed with propitious natural conditions and resources, coupled with its leaders’ efforts to improve the investment climate and bolster competitiveness, the Mekong Delta province of An Giang is proving to be an alluring investment destination.
The province is regarded as an economic and trade centre, connecting three large cities (Ho Chi Minh City, Can Tho city and Cambodia’s Phnom Penh city). An Giang is a major gateway for trade exchanges in the country, particularly Mekong Delta localities and member countries of the ASEAN.
Located at the Mekong River upper stream and with fertile and ample water sources, An Giang has been one of the country’s pivotal agricultural production locations.
Rice has been the province’s key staple, covering more than 250,000 hectares of cultivated land. Its production consists of three crops using 35 types of rice varieties. High-quality varieties account for 70-80 per cent. Total paddy rice production output reaches nearly four million tonnes per year.
Cereals are also one of the province’s advantages with a total cultivated area of approximately 38,000ha, generating more than 900,000 tonnes in annual output. Diverse specialised quality cereal growing zones have thus far been launched in the province, such as groundnut, green bean, soybean, sesame, and taro growing areas.
Seafood production has become the province’s spearhead sector, generating an annual production output of over 300,000 tonnes, consisting of diverse kinds of fish, shrimp and eel. Tra and basa fish are the province’s speciality.
An Giang also abounds with potential for tourism development, with diversified options on offer such as eco-tours, community tours and even religious tours. The province’s well-known cultural, historical and resort sites include Nui Sam in Chau Doc city, Nui Cam in Tinh Bien district, Oc Eo archaeological site in Thoai Son district, Tuc Dup resort in Tri Ton district, and Nui Dai resort and Tra Su indigo forest eco resort in Tinh Bien district.
An Giang tourism charms visitors through a variety of distinctly local tours, which offer visitors opportunities to partake in local cultural feasts, like the cow racing festival of the Khmer people, the Ramadan festival celebration of the Islamic Cham ethnic community, or the Sam Mountain Regional Goddess Festival.
In past years, the provincial tourism sector has made ceaseless efforts to improve its image among visitors by raising service quality and diversifying offerings combined with environmental protection schemes.
Efforts have been made towards attracting private investment into tourism projects, and promoting the province’s tourism on key domestic and foreign markets.
Bettering the business climate for higher competitiveness
To take advantage of the province’s potential in a more efficient manner, An Giang has taken a raft of measures to ameliorate its business and investment climate, honing its competitiveness.
For years now, An Giang’s Department of Planning and Investment has taken the initiative in collaborating with other authorised management agencies to enact plans and decisions which are aimed at improving its provincial competitiveness index (PCI).
The PCI’s main targets are to win investor’s satisfaction through administrative procedural reforms, and shortening the time of processing, ensuring transparency and creating a conducive and impartial business climate for all organisations, businesses and local residents in running production and business activities in the province.
According to deputy director of the Department of Planning and Investment, Pham Thanh Nhon, when contributing to the compilation of the province’s annual or five-year social and economic development plans, the department has always taken the implementation of measures to enhance its PCI ranking as top priority in realising annual or five-year development targets.
These efforts had paid off, as most of the time for processing procedures related to doing investment and business in the province had shortened significantly, Nhon noted.
For instance, it now takes only one working day to complete procedures for business registration, from the previous 1.5 to 3 days. In addition, to bring more comfort to investors, the department has accepted businesses conducting registration online, and now sends final results via email.
In respect to settling investment procedures in the provincial areas, and in light of the rules on joint actions in tackling investment records and procedures under the one-stop shop mechanism (enclosed in Decision 32/2016/QD-UBND dated June 30, 2016 of An Giang People’s Committee), the projects with investment proposals to be approved by the provincial People’s Committee will now undergo a six-step process (formerly eight-step), and the total time for procedure processing - from the date of receiving the investment proposals to the time the investor will officially embark on the project - will be shortened to 90 days (formerly 148 to 201 days).
The rules have also set a specific timeline for settling each type of procedure. For instance, the procedure for approving investment proposals will take 16 working days. The procedure for granting investment certificates of projects whose investment proposals that need to be approved by the province only takes one working day. For those projects whose investment proposals are to be decided by higher management bodies, five working days are required.
Additionally, to simplify investor activities, on March 2, 2016 An Giang People’s Committee chairman signed a decision for the formation of An Giang Business Support Committee and an associated assistance team. The committee is led by a provincial People’s Committee deputy chairman and has members of authorised management agencies based in the province. The committee’s main functions are joining efforts with other departments, sectors and localities to help investors and businesses access investment projects, and state policies and regulations. The commitee is also in charge of tackling difficulties arising in the project implementation process and working on promoting An Giang’s image, and building an open, friendly and transparent investment climate in the province.
The assistance team will also receive comments and input from investors and businesses, adding them to reports for submission to the committee chairman.
The province’s efforts to improve its investment climate have been appreciated by local business leaders.
Trinh Van Phu, director of Trinh Van Phu Company Limited, said that “During investment procedure processing and continuing up to when our project became operational, I received active support from management at all levels, particularly the Department of Planning and Investment. The procedures have been made much simpler.”
This company, based in Tri Ton district, operates in the field of rice exports with a total investment capital of $10 million.
“Besides effective operational procedures, the province’s active support has been a motivating factor for our decision to double our export rice production capacity from 40,000 to 80,000 tonnes per year,” Phu said.
Source : VIR – Hoang Nghi
Key words: An Giang, a gateway, for ASEAN market.
