Golf course displaces farmers, taints water

Under a decision signed by the Hoa Binh People’s Committee in November 2004, more than 300 households, or 1,000 people, were resettled in a new residential area, leaving 311ha of land in the Rong Can, Rong Vong and Rong Tam hamlets for the 54-hole golf course.

Located on a road leading from a residential area to the farmers’ fields in the mountains, the golf course blocks access to the area for many farmers.

Rong Can farmers must gather at the entrance of the golf course at 5.30am and wait for a 2.5 tonne truck to carry them across the golf course to their fields and back home at 5 pm.

Residents of Rong Vong and Rong Tam hamlets have to show their ID cards to use a narrow path across the golf course to their fields.

Nguyen Xuan Loc, head of Rong Vong hamlet, said the existing path was 8km longer than the road they had used from their previous homes to the fields in the mountains.

Loc said several children in the hamlet had quit school because of the distance from home to school.

According to Hoang Ngoc Kieu, secretary of Lam Son Commune Party Committee, unemployment is the biggest problem now facing residents.

When applying for an investment license, the Korean investors of the golf course promised to provide job opportunities to Lam Son residents.

But the number of local residents employed by the project dropped from between 400 and 500, when it was under construction to only 70 when it became operational.

Kieu said 1,000 Lam Son residents were jobless, while the 70 employed by the golf course were poorly paid.

Most displaced residents used their site clearance compensation, which was paid in 2006, to build new houses and buy motorcycles, and now have little savings.

Most Lam Son residents are without work because the 100sq.m allocated to each household in the new residential areas is too small for farming and the road to the fields has been blocked.

Kieu said he would resign from his post if Hoa Binh provincial authorities did not offer more jobs to Lam Son residents.

In addition to the lack of jobs, the biggest challenge facing Lam Son residents is the pollution of Rong Tam Spring, the sole source of water in the area. The spring, currently part of Phuong Hoang Golf Course, has been tainted by chemicals such as insecticide, which is used to clean and keep grass green.

According to the Lam Son Commune People’s Committee, at the request of local residents, in May, the Hoa Binh Department of Science and Technology sent a work team to the commune to analyse the water from Rong Tam Spring. The result of the analysis revealed that water from the spring was "undrinkable".

More than 3,000 of the 4,000 residents of the Lam Son Commune have been using untreated water from Rong Tam Spring. "Although they are aware, they have to use it, because there is no other water supply in the area," said Kieu.

Phuong Hoang has contributed very little to Hoa Binh Province’s budget.

According to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment’s Land Management Department, last year golf courses nationwide paid an average of only VND124 million (US$7,300) in taxes per ha each year.

Boosting real estate lending

In preparation for its plan to throw a life preserver to the real estate sector, the State Bank of Viet Nam (SBV) has asked commercial banks to provide a total count of the number of loans given to the property market.

Economists and property experts, however, have differed on whether the request was necessary.

The chairman of the HCM City Real Estate Association, Le Hoang Chau, was quoted by Lao Dong (Labour) newspaper as saying that banks should re-schedule loans to property companies so they could pursue unfinished projects.

"Today, the biggest concern of most members of the association is the shortage of capital with reasonable interest rates for the property market, and the liquidity of this market," said Chau.

In a meeting with the Finance Ministry, the SBV and the HCM City People’s Committee in January, Chau proposed that the Government should set up a special fund of VND10 trillion ($5.8 billion) to support commercial banks and real estate firms.

Chau said the downturn in the property sector could affect other sectors, including the capital market.

In a seminar on the property and securities market in HCM City on November 13, finance specialist Tran Hoang Ngan said a fund to support the real estate market should be set up to prevent bankruptcies from occurring.

SBV’s former governor Le Duc Thuy said firms’ concerns over the sluggish market, was reasonable, if the Government did not issue macroeconomic policies to intervene.

Two major proposals were noted at seminars on solutions to save the property markets in the past few months.

The first supported the self-adjustment of the property market to adapt to the market economy while the second proposed a Government financial plan to create liquidity and rescue the property market.

Supporters of the first believed that most players in the local property market were speculators who often transfer property to each other. Because of this practice, prices had risen as much as 400 per cent in the last two years.

Although land and house prices dropped by 60 per cent in the past 10 months, houses are still priced too high compared with the financial capacity of many tenants, according to seminar attendees.

Land and house prices should fall by an additional 50 per cent to make them acceptable for tenants, they said.

Supporters of the second proposal said a lifebuoy was required for the property market, which was in a nascent stage compared to other markets around the world.