BTO-  In the recent years, life of residents in Tan Hai commune (La Gi town) has considerably changed thanks to high economic efficiency of cultivation restructure. Therefore, the number of poor households has sharply decreased, some families even get rich. Tan Hai commune owns a lot of advantages for economic development. But formerly, local people mainly relied on rice, cassava and corn cultivation, and marine products exploitation, so little progress has been made in their living standards with a poverty rate stayed higher than the average percentage of La Gi Town. In the last few year (especially in 2013), many farmer households have noticed low economic efficiencies of cassava and corn, as well as a lot of benefits brought by dragon fruit. So they have fearlessly made planting restructure and selected dragon fruit as one of key cultivated crops in this locality, particularly in the hamlets of Hiep Thuan, Hiep Tri and Hiep Le.

Hitherto, the total cultivated area of dragon fruit of Tan Hai commune has reached 420 ha. Owning to stable price of dragon fruit, a great number of families have rather good earnings thereby they have sustainably escaped from the poverty and enriched themselves. In 2013, 41 households in Tan Hai commune jumped out of poor households list, accounting for 2,1% of the total poor households, higher than the goal of the year (0.5%). Besides, revenues from dragon fruit considerably contributed to budget collection performance of Tan Hai commune, with nearly VND 4 billion collected (exceeding 13.5% over the year plan) and helped create jobs for over 250 local labourers. Basing on the current per capital income, which is estimated at VND 18.3 million/year, authority of Tan Hai commune has made significant progress in mobilizing people power to join in rural road construction.

However, with the reality of increasing planting area of dragon fruit happening  across the province, local authority to make sure that dragon fruit area is not expanded beyond the general planning. People in Tan Hai now are absolutely concentrating on dragon fruit production, abandoning some previous key crops such as paddy, cassava, corn, as well as cattle and livestock breeding.  The state management work in Tan Hai has encountered some following issues:

- Developing dragon fruit production toward safe and suistanable practice;

-Regulating the proper investment of low-voltage electricity systems for dragon fruit lighting to balance the electricity supply for daily life and production.

Phuong Lan (Source: Binh Thuan Newspaper)