Workers process pineapple for export at a factory in the Mekong Delta province of An Giang (Photo: VNA)Fruit and vegetable exportsgenerated 3.52 billion USD in revenue last year, becoming one of the six groupsof commodities posting export turnover of over 3 billion USD.
Southern provinces producemore than 10 million tonnes of vegetables per year. The first quarter’s outputconcentrates in January, over 60 percent.
Estimates show that if eachpeople consumes about 10kg of vegetables each month, the remaining 2.5 milliontonnes in Q1 will need processing, according to Deputy Director Le Thanh Tungof the Crop Production Department at the Ministry of Agriculture and RuralDevelopment (MARD).
Interms of fruit, dragon fruit generates the highest output, 1.4 million tonnesper year, followed by banana (over 1 million tonnes), mango (over 800,000tonnes), and durian (over 600,000 tonnes). Among them, dragon fruit, jackfruit,pomelo, banana, and mango face the biggest sale pressure in Q1.
Althoughthe Mekong Delta produces the majority of the fruit output, it still lacks processingfacilities. As a result, local farmers mainly sell fresh fruit and may face risksif there are any changes in import markets during the harvest season.
Nhan dan cited Nguyen Quoc Toan, Director of the MARD’s Agro Processingand Market Development Authority, as saying that Vietnam turns out some 28million tonnes of fruit and vegetables annually, but it has only 237 processingestablishments at present. This weakness has led to a considerable excess in freshproduce whenever the harvest season comes.
To solve this problem, businesses should improve their processingcapacity while farmers and cooperatives need to ensure production meets standardsto guarantee qualified materials for processing.
Meanwhile, the recent congestion of thousands of lorries carrying fruitfor export to China at northern border gates also pointed out the urgent needto switch from small-scale unofficial export to the official one, further boostsale in the domestic market with growing demand, and step up shipments to otherpotential markets like Japan, Australia, and India.
It is also necessary to diversify sale forms such as via e-commerceplatforms, which has proved highly useful during the recent COVID-19 outbreaks,according to Toan./.
VNA
