HA NOI — The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) continues to petition the Government for a reduction in import taxes on animal feed due to escalating world prices, said Department of Animal Husbandry director Hoang Kim Giao.
In MARD’s meeting discussing solutions to the problem of animal feed prices yesterday, the ministry made plans to convince the Government to allow foreign-invested companies in Viet Nam who import unprocessed materials for animal food processing to sell these materials to all processors. The current regulations allow them selling imported materials to distributors only.
MARD also requested the removal of a value-added tax on cassava, maize and soybeans to improve conditions for producers purchasing directly from farmers instead of going through middlemen.
The petition suggests the Government lengthen the period of paying VAT taxes on certain materials up to 90 days after registering with customs. Additionally, tax exemption should continue on items such as wheat flour, beans, L-Lysine and whey.
Giao stated that the agriculture industry needed to come up with new animal feed materials for production instead of relying on temporary solutions.
No local producers wanted to increase animal feed prices because of the effect it had on domestic livestock breeding. However, prices sky-rocketed this year for maize and soybeans, said the general director of CP Group Ltd Co.
Deputy director of the Market Price Research Institute of the Ministry of Finance Vu Duy Anh said the Government would carefully consider reducing import taxes, while taking into account that the last reduction cost thousands of billions of dong while animal feed prices still remarkably surged.
Anh said most local agricultural produce prices remained higher than those outside the country.
