Fruit , vegetable and flower sellers at Yangon’s Danyingone Market, Insein township, are awaiting the country’s first international-standard wholesale centre with a mixture of hope and fear.
Dagon International, which is building the new market, says it is on target for completion in March 2018, but officials say it is still too soon to say whether or how space will be allocated to existing vendors.
The project is being built through a public-private partnership with Yangon City Development Committee and Myanmar Agro Exchange – a public company partly owned by Dagon International chair U Win Aung – on 85 acres, at a cost of K118 billion.
The agreement requires Dagon International to sell shares to farmers, traders and other interested parties.
The market will comprise four buildings and offer parking space for 2500 cars, brokerage space, a truck terminal, facilities for cleaning fruit and vegetables, cold storage for fish and meat, a fuel station, staff rest rooms and a recreation centre.
Similar markets will be built in Nay Pyi Taw, Mandalay and Muse, Cooperatives Minister U Kyaw San previously announced, in collaboration with the ministries of agriculture and trade.
The new markets are intended to cut down the losses growers suffered as unsold fruit and vegetables grew mouldy. Now the vendors operating beside the new market want to know if they can rent or buy space in it.
“YCDC hasn’t told us anything yet. We’re a bit worried about our future. We don’t know whether our market will be closed down when the new one opens, and whether we will have a chance to work in it,” said Daw Thet Mar, a vendor at Danyingone since it opened in 2004.
Fruit vendor U Sein Lwin said, “We don’t know if we’ll have the chance to move into the new market or not. Ever since I heard about the cleaning facilities and the cold storage I’ve been hoping I can move my shop there. We can’t keep fruit any length of time before it rots, and we lose a lot of money. Sometimes we have to throw away more fruit than we sell because of decay. If we can get space in the cold storage units of the new market, we will suffer much less waste.”
General Thant Sin Tun, deputy director of YCDC’s markets department, said, “As the market is still under construction, we cannot decide yet whether space will be rent or sold.”
Quoted from mmtimes.
