Vietnam's between-crop hunger drops in first 4 months

Vietnam detected 105,100 families which faced food shortage in the first four months of this year, posting a year-on-year decrease of 10.4 percent, its General Department of State Reserves said Wednesday.

In April alone, Vietnam had 14,200 households with 61,500 people that experienced food shortage, down 57.7 percent and 56.8 percent, respectively, against April 2015.

In the January-April period, Vietnam offered hungry families a total of 8,500 tons of food and some 590 million Vietnamese dong (over 26,000 U.S. dollars), said the general department.

Between-crop hunger often occurs in the mid-land and mountainous northern region, the northern part of the central region, coastal central provinces and the Central Highlands region.

Vietnam plans to invest over 48 trillion Vietnamese dong (over 2.1 billion U.S. dollars) in implementing poverty reduction programs nationwide from 2016 to 2020, according to its Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs.

According to new poverty criteria applied in the 2016-2020 period, Vietnam currently has a poor household rate of some 12 percent. Enditem