At the National Assembly session discussing economic – social issues on the morning of November 1st, the Minister of Transport and the Minister of Construction informed members of the National Assembly a number of measures to adjust the planning and balance the production of two industries: steel and cement.

According to delegate Le Nhu Tien, up to now,the  total steel capacity of the country has been more than 20 million tons per year, while the actual demand is only 11.5 million tons. In a south eastern province, 9 out of 18 steel projects are unscheduled and consume over 60% of electricity of the whole province.

To address this, Mr  Vu Huy Hoang, the Minister of Industry and Trade, said: “The Ministry has collaborated with industries and localities to review steel industry in the spirit of implementing scheduled steel projects only”.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MOIT) will require changes in technology and equipment, and even suspend or terminate the operation of steel projects which are detected to be outside the planning, inefficient and using energy consuming and backward technologies.

According to Minister Vu Huy Hoang, our country is now lacking of steel billet, not finished steel. Therefore, the MOIT will strengthen the inspection and the coordination with sectors and localities to ensure that steel planning will focus on steel billet production projects and limit finished steel projects .

Explaining to the National Assembly about the planning of cement industry, the Minister of Construction Nguyen Hong Quan acknowledged that the supply of domestic cement projects is high and has exceeded demand. The annual growth of cement market is about 11%. Currently, the Government’s direction is reducing clinker imports (3.5 million tons imported in 2009, about 1.7 million tons imported in 2010).

The Ministry of Construction is proposing measures to report to the Government, including strengthening the cement consumption even further by using cement in traffic works, irrigation, inland canals, rural roads ... and even highways.

Mr Quan considers this as a major solution to reduce the disproportion between supply and demand of the cement industry in the future by about 2-5 million tons of cement.

Besides, according to Mr Quan, the Ministry has submitted to and been approved by the Government the scheme “Development of alternative non-fired materials for materials made from clay” to solve the problems of cement consumption, environmental pollution, energy and land caused by the production of ceramic and tiles from fired clay.

Besides, based on calculations of the solutions, the Ministry of Construction is working with the Cement Association to promote the export of clinker.

By Minh Duc