Establishing a strong and solid legal foundation for digital transformation
Digital transformation simply cannot succeed without a clear, streamlined, and fully synchronized legal corridor. During the period from 2022 to 2025, the MAE has played a proactive advisory role and exercised strong leadership and direction, resulting in the creation of a comprehensive system of normative legal documents and widespread implementation plans.
The MAE has provided advice and submitted to the Government for promulgation two important Decrees (Decree No. 101/2024/NĐ-CP and Decree No. 102/2024/NĐ-CP) as well as five Circulars (Nos. 08, 09, 10, 11, 12/2024/TT-BTNMT) that provide detailed regulations for implementing the Land Law 2024. These represent critical and pivotal steps toward digitizing and standardizing land management procedures, which is the core area of Project 06 under the MAE’s responsibility. In addition, the MAE has submitted to the Government three Decrees on delineating the authority of two-tier local governments in the fields of agriculture and environment (Decrees No. 131/2025/NĐ-CP, 136/2025/NĐ-CP, and 151/2025/NĐ-CP), thereby enabling localities to exercise greater initiative and proactiveness in applying digital transformation. Of particular note, the MAE submitted to the Prime Minister for issuance Decision No. 1671/QĐ-TTg dated August 5, 2025, approving the plan to cut and simplify regulations and administrative procedures related to production and business activities falling under the MAE’s management scope.
In terms of internal direction and administration, prior to the merger, between the former Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and the former Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, both ministries had issued six Decisions concerning overall and annual plans for implementing Project 06 of the Government, along with one Directive to continue strongly promoting the implementation of Project 06 (Directive No. 9412/CT-BNN-KHCN). Notably, the Party Committee of the MAE issued Plan No. 13-KH/ĐU on promoting interconnected and synchronized digital transformation and Resolution No. 14-NQ/ĐU on breakthrough development of science, technology, innovation, and digital transformation in the agriculture and environment sector. These actions clearly affirm the leading role of the Party in guiding and orienting digital transformation efforts.
The MAE has also promulgated ten different plans covering a wide range of areas, from developing normative legal documents for the two-tier government model to implementing Resolution No. 57-NQ/TW of the Politburo and Resolution No. 193/2025/QH15 of the National Assembly, as well as plans for building national and sector-specific databases. Coordination with the Ministry of Public Security has been clearly demonstrated through the issuance of two joint plans, including the Plan to implement tasks under Project 06 (Plan No. 395/KHPH-BCA-BNN&MT) and the Plan to carry out the campaign to enrich and clean the national land database (Plan No. 515/KH-BCA-BNN&MT).
Achievements in administrative reform and online public services
Thanks to the above efforts, there have been many clear and tangible reforms in cutting and simplifying administrative procedures while significantly improving the quality of online public services, thereby bringing direct and substantial benefits to citizens and enterprises. In implementing Resolution No. 66/NQ-CP, the MAE conducted a comprehensive review of a total of 650 administrative procedures under its management, of which 518 procedures were related to production and business activities. The MAE has successfully cut and simplified 468 out of 518 procedures, achieving an impressive rate of 90.34%; reduced processing time for administrative procedures by 5,735 out of 16,667 days, reaching 34.41%; and reduced compliance costs by 5,086 out of 9,702 billion VND, attaining 52.42%. The MAE also proposed replacing paper-based dossier components with data exploitation for 26 procedures and suggested adding another nine procedures to this roadmap.
The MAE has completed the provision of four out of five essential public services as required by Project 06 and Decision No. 422/QĐ-TTg, with a focus on the group of procedures concerning “Registration of changes in land use rights and ownership rights of assets attached to land”. The MAE has consolidated the Information System for Settlement of Administrative Procedures and connected it with national databases (such as business registration, insurance, and population) as well as other digital platforms, including the National Public Service Portal and VNeID. The MAE has made available 224 administrative procedures on its own Information System for Settlement of Administrative Procedures, fully integrated with the National Public Service Portal, comprising 76 full-online services and 148 partial-online services. The rate of full-online public services among eligible procedures reached 85.39%; the online payment rate achieved 94.57%. The rate of fully synchronized administrative procedure settlement results on the National Public Service Portal reached 100%. However, the digitization rate of dossiers and settlement results currently stands at only 4.79%, and the rate of online dossiers among total received and processed dossiers is only 8.7%, indicating that although infrastructure and services are ready, the habit of using online services among citizens and enterprises still requires more time to change and adapt.
Land database and vessel identification database – the core focus of data in the agriculture and environment sector
Project 06 considers data as the most important resource. The MAE manages two extremely complex and large-scale data fields: land and fisheries.
With regard to the Land Database, the MAE has completed the construction of four centrally-built component datasets, including: Current land use status data at regional/national level; National land use planning and plans; Land price framework (although the Land Law 2024 has abolished the land price framework regulation); and Basic land survey data at regional/national level. At the local level, all 34 out of 34 provinces and cities are building and perfecting their land databases. Approximately 2,360 out of 3,321 commune-level units have completed their cadastral databases, with more than 49.7 million land parcels put into operation. The MAE has synchronized land databases of all 34 new provinces (equivalent to 61 out of 63 former provinces) into the National Land Database, including cadastral data of 7,264 out of 10,041 communes (under the old administrative boundaries). The 90-day-and-night campaign to enrich and clean land data (pursuant to Plan No. 515/KH-BCA-BNNMT) has achieved initial positive results. All 34 localities have cross-checked 55.1 million records of residential land and housing with the National Population Database.
In the fisheries sector, vessel identification based on the National Population Database platform is a key task. The MAE has completed data reconciliation for fishing vessels. Among them, 69,532 fishing vessels have citizen identification numbers (CCCD) that match the identification numbers in the National Population Database. The rate of updating CCCD/ID card numbers on the software as of August 11, 2025 reached 95.3% (76,807 out of 81,656 fishing vessels). This implementation not only serves administrative management but also directly contributes to combating illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
Remaining difficulties and challenges
The most fundamental issue remains the bottlenecks and obstacles related to land data. This is big, highly complex data that changes constantly. In particular, many localities have not linked their databases with administrative procedure management activities, resulting in incomplete data updates. The comprehensive review, verification, and supplementation of housing information and digital addresses to “enrich and clean” the land database represents an enormous workload that requires substantial funding and fully synchronized coordination.
Regarding infrastructure, some provincial Departments of Agriculture and Environment still face limitations in information technology infrastructure conditions (lack of servers), and allocating funds for investment and upgrading of equipment and infrastructure to ensure security and safety encounters numerous difficulties, with investment and procurement procedures often failing to meet required timelines. Moreover, data connection and sharing services as well as electronic authentication/identification services (such as connection to the National Population Database) sometimes operate unstably, with slow processing speeds and frequent errors.
The implementation of fishing vessel registration and fishing logbooks for declaring residence for crew members and vessel owners on fishing boats faces many difficulties due to vast operational areas and the lack of technological connectivity solutions.
Strategic orientation for the 2026 – 2030 Period
To address existing limitations and further promote digital transformation, the MAE needs to continue perfecting the governance and management framework for data in all fields, thereby serving as the basis for building, completing, connecting, and sharing national and sector-specific databases and utilizing the National Population Database to serve administrative procedures in the electronic environment.
Continue investing in building, completing, and effectively operating national databases and specialized databases in agriculture and environment to create a solid data foundation that serves direction, management, and public service provision, following the principle of “accurate – sufficient – clean – live – unified – shared”. Databases will be collected accurately right at the source and processed according to standardized procedures; implement open data initiatives so that citizens and enterprises can exploit and create new value. At the same time, data will be connected and synchronized to the National Data Center and shared with ministries, sectors, and localities to serve the Government’s direction and administration as well as the settlement of administrative procedures and the implementation of open data initiatives.
Complete and put into operation the MAE’s Information System for Settlement of Administrative Procedures, strongly promote digitization, improve quality, further develop full-online public service delivery models, automatically issue permits, and provide new personalized digital services based on data.
The MAE will continue investing in building and deploying a unified and centralized digital infrastructure, operating and upgrading sectoral data centers with modern technology. Build an intelligent Operations Monitoring Center (SOC) to enhance public management and operational efficiency based on data. The MAE has invested in information security solutions following a four-layer model, with a seven-layer firewall system integrating machine learning technology to prevent cyberattacks. Continue coordinating with the Ministry of Public Security to implement tasks related to location identification, building the national digital address system; vessel identification on the National Population Database platform; and electronic identification and authentication.
Huong Tra (Hai Dang translated)