On February 2, 2018, to celebrate the 45 years of diplomatic relations between Belgium and Vietnam, Belgian Federal Minister for Agriculture, Mr. Denis Ducarme, visited and worked at the Vietnam National University of Agriculture. Accompanying the Federal Minister were Mrs. Jehanne Roccas – the Belgian Ambassador to Vietnam, the Belgian Directorate General the Belgian Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain, representatives of the Department of Development Cooperation – Embassy of Belgium, and Head of the International Cooperation Department - Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. Welcoming the delegation from Vietnam National University of Agriculture (VNUA), were Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Thi Lan – University President, Prof. Dr. Tran Duc Vien – Chairman of the University Council, faculty leaders, heads of supportive offices, leaders of the projects under the collaboration with Belgium, as well as other university staff who are the former PhD students at Belgian universities.
At the meeting, the Federal Minister Denis Ducarme showed his gratitude to the warm welcome of the university leaders and staff. On behalf of the university, the University President Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyen Thi Lan expressed the honor of the university, being the only university that the Federal Minister visited during his working visit to Vietnam and emphasized that this event would mark an important milestone in the development of the university; in addition, this visit symbolized the support of the Belgian government and residents in developing the cooperation partnerships between the two countries: Vietnam – Belgium.
To Vietnam National University of Agriculture, Belgium is the biggest development partner. Since 1997, Vietnam National University of Agriculture has collaborated with Belgian universities through the Institutional Cooperation program with the community of French-speaking universities. This cooperation program lasts over 20 years and is divided into four phases with the overall objective of enhancing teaching and research capabilities for the staff and students of the Vietnam National University of Agriculture via short training courses, research projects, collaborative PhD programs and improvement for library system. Recently, with the support of ARES-CCD, the Master’s program in Food Technology in collaboration with the University of Liège was organized from 2014 to 2018. Apart from collaborating with French-speaking universities, VNUA also develops the collaboration with Belgian Flanders’ universities with the aim of boosting teaching and research capacities in the field of food technology and agronomy. As of 2017, there are over 120 VNUA lecturers and staff sent to Belgium for post-graduate programs and short training courses in total.
Speaking at the meeting, the Belgian Federal Minister of Agriculture - Denis Ducarme offered some consultations to Vietnam’s agriculture in the process of integration and market expansion. According to the Federal Minister, university-level cooperation between Belgium and Vietnam is an important channel to improve the bilateral experience exchange, helping Vietnam’s agriculture to develop more comprehensively. He emphasized that Vietnam National University of Agriculture plays a very important role, being one of the major Vietnamese partners in agriculture to Belgium. Therefore, Belgium wish to invest and provide more supports to VNUA in the future in order to restructure Vietnam’s agriculture and solve the urgent issues facing the sector such as food safety, thereby enhancing the exports of Vietnam’s agricultural products to overseas markets, especially Europe and Belgium. The Federal Minister personally love Vietnamese food products and hope to import more of them into Belgium. He also highly evaluated the quality of Vietnamese fruits and hoped that in the future, Belgian people would have the opportunity to taste a wide variety of Vietnamese good fruits.
After the discussion session, the Federal Minister together with other members of the delegation visited the exhibition area with a series of posters presenting the results of different projects in collaboration between VNUA and Belgian partners; they also had the chance to taste the scientific and technological products of those projects such as wine, dragon fruit juice, and strawberry jam, etc.
In addition, the university leaders also accompanied the delegation to visit the Center for High-quality Pigs at the Faculty of Animal Science. At the center, the university lecturers had collaborated with the University of Liège (Belgium) and succeeded in breeding the nucleus herd of stress-negative Piétrain pigs. The stress-negative Piétrain purebred boars produced in Vietnam was recognized as the new technological advance, to be applied nationwide by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and was included in the National list of livestock breeds which are allowed to be raised and produced for business purpose in Vietnam.
Taking place during the celebration of 45 years of diplomatic relations between Belgium and Vietnam, this visit of the Belgian Federal Minister for Agriculture to Vietnam and to VNUA would help to strengthen and enhance the cooperation between the two countries in many fields, especially in the production, processing and exporting of agricultural products, providing supports to the incubation and start-ups in hi-tech agriculture, etc., thereby opening up more cooperation opportunities in training and scientific research between different Belgian universities and Vietnam National University of Agriculture.
