HANOI: Vietnam’s varied geographic and climatic conditions have allowed it to diversify its fruit and vegetable production, giving it great export potential, Nguyen Hong Son, director of the department, told a recent seminar on the potential and development orientation of horticulture and floriculture in Vietnam.
The fruit-tree-growing area, productivity and output have gone up significantly in the past 15 years. Banana is grown on the largest area followed by mango, longan, litchi, grapefruit, dragon fruit, pineapple, durian, lemon, rambutan, jackfruit, custard apple, tangerine, and guava.
There are now “concentrated production areas” for mango, dragon fruit, litchi, grape, grapefruit and others as well as for flowers, many of which adopt good agricultural practices like VietGap and GlobalGap and advanced technologies to improve productivity and quality.
But fruit and vegetable farming still faces many problems like small scale and scattered cultivation, inconsistent quality, impacts of climate change, poor harvest and post-harvest technologies, increasing competition in the global market and lack of linkages between businesses and farmers.
“A lack of diversity in fruit exports (dragon fruit accounts for 60 percent of fruit exports) and a reliance on the Chinese market is another problem,” he said.
Nguyen Huu Dat, general secretary of the Vietnam Fruits and Vegetables Association, said: “Demand for fresh fruits will continue to increase both in the domestic and overseas markets.”
Challenges and difficulties would “force Vietnam’s fruit and vegetable production sector to improve quality, meaning they must ensure consistent quality and year-round supply and meet hygiene and food safety standards.”
Businesses must work to increase exports to fastidious markets and join hands for trade promotion in foreign markets to gradually penetrate distribution systems there, he said.
He also said businesses needed to develop close links with farmers so that the latter grew products that met the demand in global markets.
Son said the country had more than 145 industrial-scale vegetable and fruit processing plants with a total capacity of 800,000 tonnes a year besides thousands of smaller ones.
The plants ran at just 50 percent of capacity due to a shortage of raw materials, he said.
Matthias Ehrtmann, division manager – food and pharma machinery at Rieckermann, Ho Chi Minh City, said last year exports of fruits and vegetables exceeded even that of rice.
