The Asian American Association (AAA) has received 114 Vietnamese antiques for an exhibition in the US starting next month and another one in February next year.

The antiques are considered typical of Vietnam’s north, south and central regions and will be first exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston from September 13 to January 3 next year. They will then be showcased at the Asian Association Museum in New York from February 2 to May 2. The items, ranging from fine arts pieces to those relating to revolutionary history, are on loan from prominent museums nationwide including in Hanoi, Da Nang City, Hue, Ho Chi Minh City, and neighboring Dong Nai and Long An provinces. Source: Tuoi Tre

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Investors place orders at Viet Dragon Securities Corp. in Ho Chi Minh City. Foreign investment in Vietnamese stocks stands at US$5 billion, including shares in commercial banks, insurance firms and major companies, an industry report said Friday, up from $4.6 billion at the end of last year.

Earlier industry reports had shown a steep drop in portfolio investment from $7.6 billion in December 2007. The current investments included $1 billion by foreign strategic investors in financials and $4 billion from funds and institutions not based in the country, the Vietnam Association of Financial Investors’ report said. Vietnam caps foreign ownership in listed domestic banks at 30 percent, with a 15 percent limit for strategic investors that can be increased to 20 percent with government approval. Foreign investors now have shares in a number of Vietnamese banks, such as Saigon Thuong Tin Bank, Asia Commercial Bank and Vietcombank, the country’s largest partly private lender. The VN Index on the main Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange has risen 70 percent this year. It added 1.8 percent on Friday. Source: Reuters

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Vietnam’s economic growth has probably begun accelerating, with the first quarter likely to be the low point in the country’s downturn, HSBC Holdings Plc said.

The economy expanded 3.1 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, the slowest pace of expansion on record. A round of rate cuts by Vietnam’s central bank, a government stimulus program, a weaker currency and resilient personal consumption expenditure are buoying the growth outlook, Prakriti Sofat, a Singapore-based economist at HSBC, wrote in a note. The economy may grow 4.5 percent for the year, compared with 6.2 percent in 2008, she said. “The worst is behind us,” wrote Sofat. Vietnam is facing a “slowdown, not a recession,” she said. The State Bank of Vietnam has cut its benchmark interest rate to 7 percent from 14 percent in October. The central bank’s moves to date represent a “massive monetary policy easing,” Sofat wrote. The easing is now “working its way through the system,” she said in the note. A government subsidy on loans – part of a stimulus package that Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung last month valued at US$8 billion – functions as a de facto further easing of monetary policy, according to HSBC. The loan subsidy program is creating a new “credit boom” in Vietnam, Citigroup Inc. said last month. Exports holding up Exports may be receiving some boost from a 10 percent “nominal depreciation” of the Vietnamese dong against the US dollar over the last year, Sofat wrote. Garment shipments have held up “reasonably well,” in part due to a focus on lower-end products that benefit during a period when shoppers’ incomes are being squeezed, she said in the note. “We’re into summer orders already, and things are holding up,” said Jonathan Pincus, an economist with the Vietnam Program at the Harvard Kennedy School in Ho Chi Minh City, when asked about garment export performance this year. Retail sales of goods and services in the country grew 21.5 percent in the first four months, according to the General Statistics Office in Hanoi. The “astounding” recent growth in retail sales in Vietnam “shows that consumption remains very strong,” HCMC-based fund manager Dragon Capital said in a note dated April 29. “Strong growth and asset price gains (including commodity prices) over the last few years, even after taking into account the recent declines, mean that the average Vietnamese person is much better off,” Sofat wrote. Vietnamese Prime Minister Dung said last month that gross domestic product may increase as much as 5.5 percent for the full year, while the International Monetary Fund foresees 3.3 percent growth. Any positive figure is “an achievement when seen in the regional context,” Sofat wrote. Source: Bloomberg

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The remains of a nghien tree in Hao Nghia Commune forest in Bac Kan Province. Deep inside the Hao Nghia forest, the sounds of nature are absent.

No bird chirps, no insect buzzes, not even the sound of wind rustling the leaves can be heard. The sounds of the forest are completely drowned in the roaring and buzzing of electric saws that are felling huge nghien trees that flourish in more than 400 hectares of limestone forest in Na Ri District’s Hao Nghia Commune in the northern province of Bac Kan. The forest is considered the province’s treasure because of the nghien trees, whose timber is hard, heavy and fairly worm-resistant. It is suitable for making tools, vehicles, ships and furniture. Scientifically known as Burretiodendron hsienmu, this species is also found in China, where it is called xianmu. In China, over-felling of both young and large xianmu trees have pushed it to the edge of extinction. Guided by a Nung ethnic minority resident, Thanh Nien found four fresh stumps in an area less than 0.05 hectares, each measuring more than a meter in diameter. The guide, Lam Truong Ngang, estimates that the biggest tree, would have weighed more than 30 cubic meters before felling. At least 100 nghien trees in the forest have been chopped down in the past two months, says Nung, who has lived in the area for about 40 years. Nguyen Ba Ngai, acting director of the provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, admits “the forest of Hao Nghia Commune is being devastated. “The price of nghien timber chopping-blocks sold to China has surged almost double over the past two weeks.” A block 20 centimeters thick and around 50 centimeters in diameter can sell for VND200,000 (US$11) inside the forest and VND350,000 ($20) when brought to the main street. “It’s hard to protect the forest then,” Ngai says ruefully. Locals say illegal logging in the forest became rampant last November after the department allotted the Agriculture and Forestry Development Investment Company 56 hectares to gather burnt, spoilt and dry wood left behind by the loggers. More locals have become loggers since then, fearful of losing the timber pie to the company under Vietnam Timber and Forest Products Association. Quite a few people have lost their protective spirit, saying authorities have made it easy for the company to destroy the forest. Ngai rejects this. “Our supervisors can guarantee that the company doesn’t abuse the permit,” he says. Last February, Na Ri District administration appointed a team of six officials of the Hao Nghia Commune to take turns to oversee 100 workers and 20 electric saws deployed by the company at all times. The supervisors were supposed to work independently, but they have received VND4.5 million ($254) a month from the company from November to February. Head of the team, Hoang Khai Chien, who is also chairman of the commune’s People’s Committee, says he did this work only on the weekends. He adds that the team only signed written receipts for being paid as a “kind of salary for supervision.” No labor contract exists between the parties, yet Ngai says: “There’s no mystery here. “The supervisors cannot work for no payment, and they’re not allowed to get paid from the state budget.” The team has given the company a clean chit while the provincial Forest Management agency recently found more than four cubic meters of nghien timber in the company area and more than 38 cubic meters just outside, all newly felled. Farmland invasion In the Central Highlands province of Dak Lak, many hectares of forests have been, and are being cleared for use as farmland for growing cash crops like coffee, cashews and pepper. The impacts of forest loss have been obvious - severe droughts, floods and the loss of groundwater. Droughts every year for the past 12 years have caused losses of more than VND8 trillion ($451.6 million) for local farmers, while floods in the same period have killed 127 people, damaged houses, orchards and fields worth some VND1.4 trillion ($79 million), according to the provincial agency responsible for disaster mitigation and flood and storm prevention. Yet the flow of immigrants is unchecked, and they continue to replace forests with farmland. Nguyen Dai Nguong, director of the provincial weather bureau, says immigrants first destroy the forests for farmland, which are in turn damaged by droughts and floods caused by deforestation. The rapid loss of forests over the past 10 years has loosened the soil and caused rainwater to flow straight into the rivers and lakes instead of recharging the groundwater, he says. This also robs the area of its topsoil, which can have disastrous implications for agriculture in the long run. Le Cuoc of the provincial Forest Management agency says the coverage of forests in Dak Lak has dropped to 45.8 percent from 70 percent 20 years ago. Districts that grow a lot of coffee are also the ones that have small coverage of forests, Cuoc says. Coffee has taken over more than 170,000 hectares of forestland. The province’s capital city Buon Ma Thuot used to be surrounded with thousands of hectares of forests. “Wild animals wandered into the city sometimes,” he says. But now, the city only has 551 hectares left, covering 1.5 percent of the area. Of these, less than a tenth is natural forest. Reported by Vu An – Tran Ngoc Quyen

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