On April 3, the Ben Hai River Basin Protection Forest Management Board (Quang Tri province) said that it is coordinating with relevant units to implement procedures for auctioning forest wood.
This amount of wood is located in an area of 14.199 hectares in sub-zone 580, Vinh O commune (Vinh Linh district), managed by the Ben Hai River Basin Protection Forest Management Board. According to the approved decision of the People's Committee of Quang Tri province, the initial starting price is 1,650,250,000 VND.
Mr. Nguyen Ngoc Hung - Director of the Ben Hai River Basin Protection Forest Management Board said that after 3 unsuccessful auctions due to no customers participating, the unit proposed a price reduction and was approved by the Provincial People's Committee.
"With a new starting price of more than 1.6 billion VND, we expect customers to participate in the auction, conduct exploitation and site clearance for road construction" - Mr. Hung said.
According to Mr. Hung, the locality is currently implementing a road project connecting the East branch of Ho Chi Minh Road with the West branch. However, there are still 4.5km of site that have not been handed over due to natural forest area.
On November 24, 2023, the Prime Minister approved the conversion of this forest area to serve the project. After that, the unit organized the auction of the converted area, with a starting price of nearly 5.9 billion dong. However, the first and second auctions have no customers. By the third time, although the price dropped to VND 3.5 billion, there was no interest in, forced to continue to decrease to more than 1.6 billion.
According to the explanation, the main reason for the lack of customers is that most of the wood is in group V to group VIII, with low economic value. In addition, the forest area that needs exploitation is located along the designed road but has not been opened to traffic, so transportation is very difficult.
While the auction is at a standstill, the road project connecting the East - West branches of Ho Chi Minh Road is at risk of being behind schedule compared to the requirements.
