Ulla Tørnæs, the Danish Minister for Development, will visit Vietnam from April 21st to 25th 2007. Her main purpose is that she will be co-hosting a conference on the Mekong River Council together with the Vietnamese Minister of Agriculture, Cao Duc Phat who is also serving as the chairman of the MRC.
The conference takes place in Hanoi and regards MRC to which Denmark is the largest donor. Other participants in the conference are Asian Development Bank and The World Bank.
Ulla Tørnæs will also visit other projects – especially in Northern Vietnam, but unlike her previous visit to Vietnam, extended traveling will not be an option due to the short time frame of the visit.
On April 23rd, Ulla Tørnæs is hosting an opening dinner at the Hilton Hanoi Opera Hotel. The Foreign Ministry of Denmark expects 100 to 150 guests at the event. The following morning, the actual conference starts with opening speeches by the two hosts.
The Danish involvement
Denmark supports the MRC through four programmes; with a total involvement of more than 80 million Danish kroner until 2010. The programmes include fisheries, flood management and basin development.
The Mekong MRC was realized by the Mekong Agreement, signed by Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam in 1995. Under this agreement member countries agreed to cooperate in all fields of sustainable development and in the utilisation, management and conservation of water and related resources in the Mekong River Basin.
