Workers weigh and package dried shrimp, a Cs Mau province's OCOP. (Photo: VNA)Dao Duc Huan, head of the OCOP Management Department, Central CoordinationOffice for New-style Rural Development (CCO), said the new set was laid down toreplace the old set issued in 2019, which has begun to show cracks after fouryears being in place.
As the old set had overlooked a wide range of products specified in DecisionNo.490, the new one has fixed the cracks by expanding its scope to cover themissing pieces.
It has also altered old scoring rules by assigning a maximum score of 40 pointsto the "community strength" category, 25 points to "marketingcapabilities", and 35 points to "product quality".
Huan said the new set had encouraged the involvement of women and ethnicminorities in the production of OCOPs by giving extra points to affirmativeactions. It has also encouraged the use of local materials and labour by addingaround one to five points to localisation efforts.
A fair amount of paperwork involved in the application process has been cut.Applicants for OCOP ratings now just have to submit a self-assessment report tothe panel of judges to have their products evaluated.
As ratings have become lenient in some localities recently, the Government hasrighted the wrong by taking charge of evaluating five-star OCOPs. It devolvedfour-star products to provincial authorities and three-star to municipal ones.
CCO Deputy Chief Phuong Dinh Anh believed that the delegation of authoritywould reduce the workloads of province-level panels and allow district-levelauthorities to play an active role in supporting their local OCOPs.
"The decentralisation of authority would allow local authorities tosupport their local OCOPs more actively," said Anh.
He also said 8,689 OCOPs had been scored by late 2022, with 65.5% of theproducts being labeled three-star, 33.6% four-star, 0.7% potential five-star,and 0.2% five-star.
Vu Ba Phu, director of the Trade Promotion Agency, Ministry of Industry andTrade, said his agency had been working since 2018 to help OCOPs carve out aniche in the global market.
Last year, the agency organised scores of business-matching events across thecountry to link OCOP producers with traders and exporters. It also engaged inmany information-sharing activities to keep them well-informed about foreignstandards.
Training courses have been implemented to help the producers get used toe-commerce platforms, which, he believes, would hold the key to theirtransborder commercial success.
On the downside, the director underlined three obstacles in the way ofproducers trying to develop trade overseas.
The first obstacle centres around their production scale. As most OCOPproducers are small in size, they are producing on a scale far from beingadequate for international trade.
For example, if a foreign supermarket chain accepts an OCOP, it would requireat least several containers of the product to be supplied monthly. For a localproducer, several containers per month would be beyond their capabilities.
The second obstacle involves their product uniformity. OCOP producers normallydo not have a sound quality management system, which is essential for qualityconsistency. Non-uniformity has barred many OCOPs from entering foreignmarkets.
The last obstacle is their low awareness of country-specific labeling andpackaging requirements. The awareness is even lower in rural areas whereproducers face more difficulties staying au courant.
The director said his agency would push ahead with trade promotion and trainingprogrammes in the short term to help the producers overcome those obstacles.The programmes would be designed in a way that each is tailor-made for aparticular OCOP./.
VNA
